Ethan Puzarne – Teach Yourself A Language Course 2023

I’ve struggled too!

Hey there! My name is Ethan, and I failed at learning Japanese and Spanish for 15 years. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that I have ZERO natural talent for learning languages.

I took 6 years of Japanese in school, and I left knowing basically nothing. After my utter failure with Japanese, I decided to switch to an easier language: Spanish!

I tried dabbling with apps like Duolingo, Pimsleur, and a few podcasts but that got me nowhere.

I decided I needed to take Spanish more seriously, so I buckled down, put all my other hobbies on hold, and made learning Spanish my entire life.

6 months later, every person I talked to was shocked that I had made such rapid progress. But how did I feel?

I felt completely depressed

When I started that 6-month journey, I discovered a style of learning called “language hacking,” which says that by memorizing grammar rules and prioritizing the most relevant phrases and words, you can start having conversations immediately.

I LOVED this! It felt so logical and organized and it produced immediate results.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work out the way I had hoped.

After 6 months of effort, I wasn’t even close to the level I wanted to be. Fluency felt further away than ever.

I hit a wall

My speech was formulaic and repetitive. I used the same words over and over again.

I couldn’t understand native speakers. They had to slow down and simplify their speech for me.

I could have a basic conversation, but couldn’t talk about anything complex.

I couldn’t understand how this approach would EVER lead me to my real goal of fluency.

In a last-ditch effort, I packed up all my belongings and moved to South America.

I lived with a host family, studied in school for 5 hours every day, and spoke to as many people as I could. Yet, I continued to struggle.

My shocking discovery about language learning

One fateful day, while speaking to my teacher, I had a revelation.

My teacher was explaining how reflexive verbs sometimes change their meaning.

I asked him for a pattern or a rule to understand WHEN the meaning changes. After all, language is logical, right?

Wrong. There are no rules, and my teacher couldn’t help me.

Languages are not logical, they are messy and chaotic, just like everything else created by humans. We create grammar explanations to help make sense of this chaos, but they aren’t “rules.”

Suddenly, I understood why this approach would never get me to fluency.

The TRUTH about reaching fluency

Memorizing grammar rules doesn’t help you learn all the patterns and exceptions that exist in languages.

Memorizing words doesn’t help you when they can have dozens of different meanings that change based on context.

Even if it were possible to remember all of them, how would you keep all of them in your head while trying to speak? That’s not how the human brain works! It’s no wonder you’ve been struggling to reach fluency.

A new approach

You cannot speak a language naturally if you don’t know how the language is actually used.

Imagine that the language is a song that you’ve never heard before and now you’re trying to learn how to sing that song. What would your first step be?

Would you study music theory or learn how to read music? Would you memorize the lyrics?

NO!

You’d listen to the song a few dozen times until it got stuck in your head. You need to know the song so well that you can mimic the melody, the lyrics, and the structure.

Language learning is exactly the same.

You need to hear the words and phrases thousands of times so that they get stuck in your head.

You need to build an INSTINCT for what the language is supposed to sound like, just like a song.

The results speak for themselves

Now that I’ve built an instinct for Spanish:

• I can speak fluently and confidently without the need to translate in my head
• I can understand people, TV shows, and books easily and instantaneously.
• I feel like I belong in the language and culture — I can speak from the heart, instead of my head.