How to reach language fluency in 4 months

I get asked this all the time, so I’ve decided to make a quick post on this.

I love connecting with people in their native language, and have lived across 5 continents. Consequently, I’ve reached varying levels of fluency across Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, German, Arabic, and Hungarian.

The Learning Stack

Here’s the simple stack I use every time.

Stack Breakdown

Pimsleur is my absolute favorite language learning program. I can’t speak for their new features, but I use their audio mp3 programs.

With Pimsleur, you learn like a baby - that is, you learn verb conjugation and sentence structure intuitively, which in my opinion is the most powerful approach. You’ll learn what “sounds right” and what doesn’t, and this will save you hundreds of hours in inefficient memorization time.

After a month of Pimsleur, you should have the mental / lingual scaffolding to start assembling basic sentences at a level of fluency a year of traditional studying would never teach you. So, once completing Pimsleur 1 (30 days), start integrating daily flash cards with Anki.

Anki is the undisputed best in class for spaced repetition, and has both iPhone and Android apps, as well as a Desktop app. Do the 1,000 most common words (make sure they come with audio).

Depending on your level of commitment, learning 15-25 words a day is definitely achievable.

Conclusions

That's really it! In short, after 4 months of Pimsleur, you’ll have developed a mature mental model for speaking that enables you to speak fluently without first having to translate from English in your head.

You’ll have acquired roughly 1,000 – 2,000 of the most common words in the language, and should be able to start formulating more complex sentences about varied topics, and having conversations with relative ease with a conversation partner. Welcome to base fluency!

Moving forward, there are plenty of apps like HelloTalk and Italki for this. Talk regularly about common topics and your shared interests for maximal impact.

Review time stacks, so you need consistency and commitment (once you finish Pimsleur, you’ll still do 1 hour a day in Anki review), but at this pace, from when you first started, you’ll have acquired a vocabulary of 4,500 words in 6 months and 9,000+ words in a year which gets you to undisputable full fluency. Congrats!

FAQ

What I want to use {some other apps}?

This is by no means the only way to learn a language to fluency. It’s what I’ve found works best for me over 10 years of language learning. Naturally, there are other things you can do that will be advantageous to your practice, like language immersion with music and video, languages tutors, etc.

If you have extra time and these work well – great! I don’t condemn these practices but found limited value given my personal preferences and time constraints.

What if I want to write as well?

This approach works best for pursuing conversational fluency. Writing comes naturally through Anki and conversational partners, especially if the language is closely related (e.g. romance languages). Pimsleur also tends to include a few supplemental reading lessons which I find valuable.

If you want to write effectively in languages such as Arabic, Japanese, and others without romanized scripts, then you’ll need a supplemental approach. I skipped Japanese Kanji and Arabic script in favor of investing into speaking capability.

Can you stack this approach with multiple languages?

Yes, as long as the languages aren’t too similar. I found difficulty stacking Portuguese with Spanish but had no problem doing German with Arabic.

Surprisingly, stacking Arabic and Hungarian is a considerable challenge because of how unrelated they are to English. The language ends up getting cataloged in the same “miscellaneous” category in your mind, and you start mixing up word retrieval.