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Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World

by Benny Lewis · 2014

Benny Lewis, who speaks over ten languages—all self-taught—runs the largest language-learning blog in the world, Fluent In 3 Months . Lewis is a full-time "language hacker," someone who devotes all of his time to finding… more

16 quotes ★ 3.66 (5,866) Nonfiction

Quotes from the Book

There are seven days in a week, and “someday” is not one of them.
24
The difference between a stumbling block and a stepping stone is how high you raise your foot.
21
You don’t know a language, you live it. You don’t learn a language, you get used to it.
13
It is not important to be better than someone else, but to be better than yesterday. – JIGORO KANO,
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A language is a means of communication and should be lived rather than taught.
8
If the goal you've set for yourself has a 100 percent chance of success, then frankly you aren't aiming high enough.
5
The true advantage children have over adults is that they are naturally less afraid to make mistakes.
4
don’t know about you, but my English isn’t perfect. I hesitate when I’m nervous, I forget precisely the right word every now and again, and there are plenty of topics I am uncomfortable talking about. Applying higher standards to your target language than you would to your native language is overkill.
2
Discipline is just choosing between what you want now and what you want most. – ANONYMOUS
2
languages like Arabic, Russian, Korean, Greek, Thai, and others that use a phonetic script essentially require that you learn only a small set of characters, which represent particular sounds, and doing so will allow you to read that language as you would read any western European language.
1
French is one of the most familiar languages to an English speaker when it comes to its written form, because it has more cognates that don’t require any spelling alterations than any other language.
1
As Saint Augustine famously said, “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.
1
The trick is to keep trying until you find a way that produces real results for you. It’s never you who’s broken, but your current approach. Fix the approach, discard what doesn’t work, and you will be much more successful
The problem with this is that you never feel ready enough. There will always be more to learn, so you will always be able to make an excuse that you should go off and learn more words before trying to speak to people. It’s
The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.
One of her criticisms of my early attempts was that we English speakers . . . tend . . . to separate . . . our words . . . too much . . . as we . . . speak.

About Benny Lewis

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About the book

Benny Lewis, who speaks over ten languages—all self-taught—runs the largest language-learning blog in the world, Fluent In 3 Months . Lewis is a full-time "language hacker," someone who devotes all of his time to finding better, faster, and more efficient ways to learn languages. Fluent in 3 How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World is a new blueprint for fast language learning. Lewis argues that you don't need a great memory or "the language gene" to learn a language quickly, and debunks a number of long-held beliefs, such as adults not being as good of language learners as children.

Book details

First published
2014
Goodreads rating
3.66 (6k ratings)

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