Lately, I camed across a video "How to learn any language in six months" by TedTalks. I don't know if you ever heard about the speaker, Chris Lonsdale. Me, I didn't. And the this he did is impressive. He was able to learn Chinese in 6 months. And now he is at the level of a native speaker. I tried to find ore information about him, but there isn't much on the Internet. I have only found a few interviews, and a book that he wrote "The Third Ear", which is surprising because I've been interested in the subject of language learning for around 2 years. And I never heard about the guy.

I also thought that learning a new language to the level of a native speaker is impossible. That you will be always making mistakes, you will always have an accent. And he proved me wrong.

You can see an excerpt from another video featuring him here here.

If he was able to learn it, any other person is able to learn it as well. In that interview they also mention that school system is not working. If it would be working, we all would be multilingual, as we all have foreign language classes at school and university.

It's really important to know how to learn a new language, because we really can spend 10 years on learning, and still be mediocore at it. I think I am a perfect example of that. For the last two years I was trying to learn German. I can say I know three languages, and I was definately the most conscientious when it came to German. It's my weakest language. Whereas I spent the least amount of time on English. And it's my strongest foreign language.

When I make an effort, I follow traditional ways of learning. I get a word lists, I memorize them, I read grammar rules, I listen to records, watch movies and play games. There was a moment I started to feel confident about my level and I tried to find a job with German. On test I had like B1 or B2 level. But at the oral examination, they gave me something like A1. This made me realize how bad my learning methods were.

So all the things I was doing wrong:

• Focusing mainly on passive learning...
• Not repeating much...
• Not learning sentence structure, just words and grammar rules...

I can also tell you, it's really difficult to change your methods. It's not only that I feel clueless and I don't really have a clear vision of what I should do from now on. But I also feel a strong resistance to new methods. It's hard to become an active language learner when you have been very passive for the past two years.