![]() ![]() Maybe you might have come across the blog/book Fluent in 3 Months? I can tell you that it’s been three months since I started learning Japanese and I’m still a beginner. This is particularly true at the lower levels, as so many people will have already acquired some English through school and will be trying their hardest to practice it with us. As monolinguals we are blessed as so much of the world is in English, but as aspiring multilinguals it is an uphill battle trying to learn another language with English as our exchange language. This has not been my experience and people reading this may relate, particularly English speakers. But I have been a teacher, a language learner several times over and I have studied language acquisition, and like some of you who may read this, I have also read about certain polyglots online who have become fluent in a matter of months and attribute a lot of it to speaking exclusively in the language with language exchange partners who don’t ever revert back to the other language with them, or if they do, they are gently reminded not to and they then obediently stick to the target language. This is not a criticism of my language exchange partners – they are kind and helpful and doing their best none of them are teachers or have studied language acquisition and all of them would have learnt their English using the same method. This has happened with all three of my exchange partners. ![]() I will say, “just speak to me in Japanese”, but this only works for one or two sentences before the conversation goes back to English. telling the time, days of the week) which has generally been taught to me in English. I feel it must be very boring and I give them a lot more English time in the exchange – I’d say anywhere from half to three quarters of a typical exchange is done in English, and what is in Japanese is generally like a typical lesson: learning a list of words to a topic (ie. I also feel that because the conversation exchange is not really ‘conversation’ but ‘teach me the absolute basics of Japanese’, it’s a hard ask for my conversation partners whose level of English is very high. ![]() Some of this has to do with the fact that my exchange partners have gone on holiday, or found jobs, or had to study for exams, but also because I’ve got to know them better so that when we do meet up, most of the conversation is in English because we’re discussing things that are going on in our lives that I can’t express in colours or numbers. In the first month I had three exchanges a week, the second month about twice a week, and the third month we limped along on an average of once a week. One of the reasons why I haven’t been posting so regularly is because I haven’t had so many exchanges this last month. Can you become fluent in three months? This will be my last post for the year with my findings so far. ![]()
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