Learning Spanish? French? Japanese?

Wherever your desires are, you can accomplish it in 3 months.

Learning a language does not need to be complicated nor a long process. Then why do we complicate the process? The problem is rarely our motivations for learning a language, but it's the methods we use.
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Here are the topics we'll discuss today:

1. How to Get Exactly What You Want
2. Finding Time In Your Schedule to Learn Anything
3. How to Learn 92.7% of Any Language in 66 Days
4. The 8 Golden Sentences to Hack Grammar
5. How to Remember 90% of Everything You Learn
6. The Secret Weapon that Kobe Bryant and Bill Clinton Uses (That You Can Too)

‍But before we talk about how to learn any language in 3 months, we have to first understand why the current methods don't work.

Why current learning methods don't work

When I travelled to South America a few years ago, I had zero knowledge of Spanish nor the cultures that I was about to immerse myself in.

I was fascinated by how quickly (2-3 months) that I and the people I was traveling with were able to reach conversation fluency. We'll talk about the scientific research behind this soon.

Inevitably, the trip ended quicker than expected and I had to return home. But I was 150% committed to continue that powerful immersive experience I had and go from 40% fluency to 100%.The problem was, now that I returned home, I didn't know how. I first started by trying to contact friends I have in my social network that may speak Spanish. But it just didn't feel comfortable asking friends to help me practice when I couldn't help them out in return.

So what could I do?...Well I resorted to books, audio tapes, and mobile apps, which is where most of us are still learning languages today. The problem was, they were:

 
• Boring
 
• Ineffective
 
• Time consuming
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Non of them provided the real-life immersive experience that I had when living in a foreign country, and I was left talking to myself or to a screen.

Despite the popularity these methods (books, classrooms, online apps) have reached in the media, scientific research shares a contrasting result.
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This was fascinating to me, and I finally understood why my friends and I were able to pick up Spanish so quickly while living in South America. I was under immersion, where 90% of what was going into my brain was retained.

What surprised me even more was how ineffective the methods that 95% of people use to learn a language.

Only 5% of what is learned through the classroom is remembered. And 10% through books.

This means that 90-95% of everything learned through these methods go through one ear and out the other! In other words, learning through immersion is up to 18x more effective than learning through classroom lectures.
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Yet I see hundreds of people still paying a premium price to go to language schools in their local cities.

I recommend saving that money and time spent in classrooms, and investing it in a plane ticket to live in a foreign country or a private teacher.

In addition, most language schools will have a teacher to student ratio of around 1 to 8, meaning 1 teacher per 8 students. This means you'll be paying more to get only 1/8th of the attention you deserve, while being forced to maintain the learning speed of the students around you, not your own.
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We could go on about this but we recommend checking out our FREE Video course, that explains in further detail.

Now let's talk about the 6 simple steps on how to learn any language in 3 months.
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1. How to Get Exactly What You Want‍

The first step to getting anything we want in life is to set clear goals. While this may seem obvious to most of you, it's crucial to go back to the fundamentals, as proper goal setting can shift everything.

"Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into visible." -Tony Robbins

The reason is that there is bad goals, good goals, and outstanding goals. Your potential is correlated to the quality of goal you have set for yourself, including language learning.

Start by asking yourself these simple questions:

 
• What opportunities will become available by speaking fluently?
 
• What would I do if I could speak this language fluently right now?
 
• How will I feel after reaching fluency?
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For some of you, it could be the ability to get a raise at your job or being able to travel the world. For others, it could be to develop a deeper relationship with your family members.The difference between a bad goal and an outstanding goal is that, outstanding goals contain:

 
• Visual specificity
 
• Measurability
 
• Out of reach
 
• Results oriented
 
• Deadline
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Here are some examples:
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‍Bad goal: ‍I want to become fluent in Spanish so I can travel to Spain by next year.
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‍Good goal: I want to become conversation fluent in Spanish so I can travel to Spain by next summer.

‍Outstanding goal: I will have a 30-minute conversation in Spanish with a native Spanish person over coffee in a cafe in Madrid on July 2016.

‍Do you notice the difference?

‍Compared to the first two goals, the outstanding goal is written as if it’s already accomplished (I want vs I will), and includes all the components of the goal-setting formula including deadline, measurability, visually specific, and results oriented.Most of us have put ourselves in a disadvantageous position by setting unclear goals.

2. Finding Time In Your Schedule to Learn Anything

Do you rely on to-do lists to get stuff done?

Upon researching the successful habits of over 200 billionaires, Olympic athletes, and entrepreneurs, Kevin Kruse reported that none of them mentioned a to-do list.

According to Kruse, there are a few key weaknesses of a to-do list:
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Doesn’t account for time. When we have a long list of tasks, we tend to tackle those that can be completed quickly in a few minutes, leaving the longer items left undone. Research from the company iDoneThis indicates that 41% of all to-do list items are never completed!

Doesn’t distinguish between urgent and important. Once again, our impulse is to fight the urgent and ignore the important. (Are you overdue for your next colonoscopy or mammogram?)

Contribute to stress. In what’s known in psychology as the Zeigarnik effect, unfinished tasks contribute to intrusive, uncontrolled thoughts. It’s no wonder we feel so overwhelmed in the day, but fight insomnia at night.

Scheduling on the other hand removes all of these barriers, and it's what the the top achievers are doing to accomplish their goals.

If you want to write a book, this could mean waking up each morning in order to write 500 words, no matter how bad the first draft is.

If you want to double your business sales, this could mean spending every week with your team reviewing your sales numbers, and executing a new growth experiment.

If you want to lose 10 pounds, this could mean running 30 minutes every morning.

Consistency is what will create results, and scheduling it into our daily calendar is the best way to create consistency.

I personally prefer digital calendars to physical ones because I can set reminders for myself, adjust it anytime I want, and take it with me anywhere I go.

Here's how I set notifications on Google Calendar
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3. How to Learn 92.7% of Any Language in 66 Days

The other reason why learning through lectures or books is ineffective, is that half the materials we learn cannot be applied in our everyday lives.
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Think about the way you speak English. About 80% of what you say can most likely be broken down into 20% of the words you actually know. This is the power of learning the most common words in any language.

A study done on the Spanish language revealed that:

‍Studying the 2000 most frequently used words will familiarize you with 84% of vocabulary in non-fiction, 86.1% of vocabulary in fictional literature, and 92.7% of vocabulary in oral speech.

And studying the 3000 most frequently used words will familiarize you with 88.2% of vocabulary in non-fiction, 89.6% of  vocabulary in fiction, and 94.0% of vocabulary in oral speech.

‍Do you notice the difference?

While memorizing the first 2,000 most common words can translate to 92.7% familiarity of the spoken language, memorizing 3,000, which is an additional 1,000 words only translate to a 1.3% increase.When your goal is learn a language in 3 months, then it makes sense to focus on the first 2,000 rather than 3,000 words then right?

So how do we get to the first 2,000 words?

Well, this is where we apply the power of scheduling.When you do the calculation, if you schedule a time in your day to memorize 30 words everyday from Monday to Friday (skip weekends), then you'll be able to hit 1,980 words (~2,000) in 3 months.i.e: 22 days * 30 words * 3 months = 1,980 words
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Here's some follow-up resources you should check out:
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Most Common Spanish Words

‍-1,000 most common Spanish words (audio version)

‍-1,000 most common Spanish words (flash card version)-5,000 most common Spanish words (Memrise)

‍Most Common English Words

‍-100 most common words in English (Wikipedia)-500 most common words in English

‍Most Common French Words

‍-100 most common words in French (audio version)-5,000 most common words in French (Memrise)

‍Most Common German Words

‍-100 most common words in German-1,000 most common words in German (audio version)
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4. The 8 Golden Sentences to Hack Grammar

Grammar is often complicated into a jungle of different concepts.

To summarize, grammar has 3 core functions:

‍1. adds words (ex. You like it -> Do you like it?)

‍2. changes existing words (ex. I eat it -> I ate it)

‍3. changes the order of those words (ex. This is nice -> Is this nice?)
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‍8 Golden Sentences: I Give John the Apple

‍This is a popular framework introduced by Tim Ferriss, originally to analyze how fast you would be able to learn the language you want.

However, it also serves as a powerful framework to learn how the grammar rules are applied in your desired language by breaking down each part of the sentence.

According to Ferriss, these 8 “golden” sentences are just about all you need to know in order to understand how the language works because it show verbs are conjugated between speaker and subject, they show gender, number, direct and indirect objects, negations and tense.

The first thing we recommend is to write down the 8 sentences you see below on the left side of a paper, and directly translate the meaning of the sentences in your desired language on the right side. We advise you check with a native speaker or your Rype coach to verify that this is correct.In this example, we did it with Spanish.
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You should pay attention to where the indirect object (John) is located in the sentence and where the direct object (Apple) is located.For example, you’ll notice that in the first sentence, the Spanish translation is the exact same ordering as the English version:

The apple is red. La manzana es roja.

However, in the third sentence, the ordering differs:

I give John the apple. Le doy la manzana a Juan. 

5. How to Remember 90% of Everything You Learn

Think about how you learned how to ride a bike, swim front crawl at the pool, or play hoops on your backyard.

You learned it though immersion.

This applies to nearly everything we want to learn, from cooking to starting a business, and especially learning a new language!

A study was done by researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center, where subjects were divided into two groups, and were observed using a technique called electroencephalography (or EEG), which measures brain processing along the scalp.

The two groups were both asked to study an artificial language, where one group studied the language in a formal classroom setting, while the other was trained through immersion.

After five months, the results clearly showed that the immersed group displayed the full brain patterns of a native speaker. This is mind boggling, since 90% of committed language learners are still learning a language using the traditional class room setting (and paying a premium price for it).

The researchers also concluded that for foreign language learners to become a native speaker, they simply must think like a native speaker, adding on that adults who were immersed can just as well become a native speaker as well.

However, the same fundamentals of immersion is not well set-up for us when we try to learn a new language.

This is mostly because the location we live in prevents us from being immersed in the language, due to the limited number of people speaking it around us.

‍Work with a Rype coach (or accountability partner)

‍Language is learned with people, and used with people. This means that immersion in language learning doesn’t happen alone.For most of us who are not living in a foreign country, this leaves us with two options:

‍a. Find someone who speaks the foreign language (and wants to learn your native language), and try to help each other out by spending half the time speaking one language and the other half speaking the other.

*Read about the pros & cons on conversation exchanges here.

‍b. Work with a qualified teacher online, who is 100% dedicated in helping you succeed.
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6. The Secret Weapon that Kobe Bryant and Bill Clinton Uses (That You Can Too)

What does Kobe Bryant and Bill Clinton have in common to get to the top of their industry?

‍They invest in coaches.

‍Kobe Bryant would not be where he is today, without Phil Jackson to guide him along the right path.

This is how anyone who has done anything great, from Steve Jobs (Bill Campbell), Tony Robbins (Jim Rohn), to Warren Buffett (Benjamin Graham) became the leaders in their respective fields.

What a coach brings is the ability to bring out the best in their players or students, that would have never been possible by themselves.

The reason why most of us have not achieved everything we want in this world, whether it be finances, language acquisition, love, health, etc. is not because of lack of talent or resources.

‍It’s because we quit too early.

According to best-selling author, Seth Godin:

Five Reasons You Might Fail to Become the Best in the World (In Anything)

1. You run out of time (and quit)2. You run out of money (and quit)3. You get scared (and quit)4. You’re not serious about it (and quit)5. You lose interest (and quit)

We all experience a high of energy and excitement when we first start to learn something new, because this is the natural part of the “honeymoon” phase.

Without a coach or someone there to guide you, most of us go through the emotions of uncertainty all the way down to acceptance mode, which is the critical point when we stop trying and quit.

Instead of being coached to overcome these dips, most of us are taught through uninteractive methods of learning, such as the classroom setting, free mobile apps like Duolingo, or online courses that require nearly zero interaction and engagement. It’s no wonder why so many of us have started to learn a new language, with zero results to show for (and hundreds of dollars down the pipe drain).

This is why we created Rype.

Combining immersion and coaching into language learning, and have dedicated our brand to not only bring you immediate results, but to help you reach mastery that’s long-lasting in any language you want to learn.

The best part is that it can be done at the comfort of your home, and it’s actually cheaper than what most language schools or private “tutors” charge.

Now it doesn’t have to be us that helps you reach mastery, but you need to find someone that can keep you accountable, inspired, and guided.This can be a friend, private tutor in your local city, or an accountability partner that you find online.

Just make sure these people are:

‍1. Fluent in your target language

2. Trained in teaching and giving you professional feedback immediately

3. Keeping you accountable every step of the way

‍Remember that the biggest reason why most people never reaching fluency in their target language is not because of age, time, or “talent.”

‍It’s lack of accountability and purpose!

‍If you're ready to get started with your Rype coach then click here.

To summarize, here are the 6 simple steps to learn a language in 3 months.

‍1. How to Get Exactly What You Want (Goal Setting)

2. Finding Time In Your Schedule to Learn Anything (Scheduling)

3. How to Learn 92.7% of Any Language in 66 Days (Most Common Words)

4. The 8 Golden Sentences to Hack Grammar (Grammar Hacking)

5. How to Remember 90% of Everything You Learn (Immersion)

6. The Secret Weapon that Kobe Bryant and Bill Clinton Uses (Coaching)

‍If you want to check out our FREE Video course, where we go in-depth about everything we discussed here, then CLICK HERE to watch it.

Over to you

Which of these 6 simple steps on how to learn any language were the most useful?Is there anything we may have missed out on?