My plan to learn a new foreign language in 2024!

I know it's probably a bit too late for New  Year's resolutions but hopefully it's not too late to learn a new foreign language this  year in today's video I'm going to share with you my plan of how I'm going to achieve fluency  in Spanish so after watching this video you can do it too in any language you want I decided to  pick up Spanish because I feel like Spanish is one of my language failures or at least I felt so so to be crystal clear and completely honest with you I know some basics I us

ed to listen to a  lot of Spanish YouTube videos Spanish music just because I like the sound of the language I also  joined some Spanish curses at the University but it was 3 years ago and I was also learning German  at that time and I finally decided to focus on one language and it was German so I've never achieved  the level of fluency in Spanish I was never able to have more complicated conversations in Spanish and I feel like a lot of language learners are stuck in this place where you  kin

da understand something more or less but when people use more advanced vocabulary you  of course don't understand and you cannot really express yourself because the only thing you know  are just some basic sentences like Me llamo Julita or Donde es el Bano? this is not really a level of fluency  in my opinion because what fluency means to me is that you can feel comfortable while speaking and  you can have different spontaneous conversations on variety of topics in today's video I'm going  to sh

are with you the exact steps that I'm going to take to simply become fluent in Spanish to be  able to understand more complex conversations and also take part in them this is my main focus for  this year and actually there are just 10 months left but I still think that this is a pretty  reasonable period of time to achieve fluency on the understanding that you have some basics  there are people who claim that you can achieve fluency much faster so you may wonder why my  goal is actually 10 month

s and the answer is that you can achieve fluency much faster simply  if you study more if you spend more time on it if you study a foreign language for 8 hours per  day because maybe this is your job for sure it is possible to achieve spoken fluency in just  a few months but I still want to maintain all of my other responsibilities I want to work  I want to create YouTube videos for you guys I want to maintain my mental and physical health I  want to have some social life spend time with my fami

ly and friends and take care of my cat I have  some serious stuff to do so I think that achieving fluency in 10 months taking all of this into  consideration is pretty realistic I plan to study for one maybe 2 hours per day and maybe maybe I  will skip some days occasionally I will try not to but I know it can happen I want to be pretty  flexible so I'm not going to share with you my plan for every single day for those 10 months but  I'm going to tell you what's the most important so I'm going t

o tell you what I'm going to study  and how I'm going to study if you subscribe to my channel you will have an opportunity to see my  future videos where I talk about all the things that I realize during this journey and all the  things that are important during this process so if you are interested in it subscribe if you have  any thoughts questions or tips comment down below because I'm looking forward to a discussion input  based learning is not enough I say it because I've experienced it I d

id a lot of input in Spanish  mostly through listening and I can confidently say that listening makes you better at listening  and understanding but it's not going to break your language barrier so the problem with input-based  learning is that it can create this weird feeling that you can understand a foreign language but  cannot speak it and you feel totally speechless so you know a lot of words passively which means  that you can understand them but you cannot really speak because you are not

familiar with using  them so the problem is that they just don't come to your mind when you want to translate a sentence  from your native language to your target language however there are some advantages of listening and  one of them is that it is relatively simple to do it doesn't require that much effort to find an audiobook and play it and you can also multitask a bit so you can clean your room or cook dinner  in the meantime and this is actually something that I recommend you to do in my

other videos  so I think it is a good method and I haven't changed my mind about it but I think that there  is a time when it's good to go one step further and do something a little bit more uncomfortable  I want to go out of my comfort zone in these 10 months and transform my passive vocabulary into  my active vocabulary I'm going to practice my active language skills by journaling by writing  my own texts and articles by translating texts from my native language into Spanish I'm going to  prep

are some presentations and record myself and I'm going to practice conversations with my tutor  there are actually a lot of ways of how you can practice output and most of them work pretty  well so this is what I'm going to do passive versus active listening let's go back to listening  for a while because even though my main focus for these 10 months is mostly output it doesn't  mean I'm going to stop listening and reading it is essential to learning new vocabulary from a  context and new Expres

sions often used by native speakers there is passive listening and active  listening passive listening is when you don't pay attention to spoken words and active listening  is when you try to understand every single message whenever I feel a bit lazy I use posive listening  and it gives me an impression that I study a bit and that I learn new words but I think that active  listening is a real GameChanger I noticed a huge difference between passive and active listening  active listening is way mo

re demanding but it gives better results and what I mean by active  listening is to sit down watch a video a few times write down new vocabulary translate new  vocabulary rewatch the video and try to understand everything and remember all the new words if  you do it a couple of times you will for sure notice a difference between this and listening to  a foreign language while cooking a dinner I think that passive listening can still imp improve your  language skills but active listening is way m

ore effective Gramma there are some well-known pols  who say don't study grammar don't try to memorize grammar it is a waste of time and I politely  disagree because I didn't study grammar in fact I even gave up on Spanish because of a past stance  the thing is that you cannot really tell any story that happened to you if you don't know it so I  remember looking at all of those conjugations all of those irregular verbs and it was late at  night I was also studying German at that time and I just

thought it didn't make sense to continue  it So eventually I only learned some basic Spanish grammar mostly from a context and you know what  it didn't make me fluent I realize I really need to master Spanish grammar to be able to take part  in conversations the simple reason why you need to master gramar is that it gives you confidence  you come across differently while speaking you know how to create correct sentences and of  course some mistakes can happen from time to time but the important

thing is that you are aware  of the rules I didn't learn grammar and I remember I was all the time unsure if I use the correct  conjugation the correct tense and it's really uncomfortable feeling so my advice is do some  of those boring Gramma exercises that everybody complains about because I think it will help you  so much you know you will know conjugations you will remember the tenses I think it's going to  be such an improvement and this is also something that I'm going to focus on during t

hese 10 months  don't treat grandma like it is an elephant in a room because you need to know how to combine words  into sentences correctly I cannot even imagine speaking English fluently without knowing grammar  and I mean knowing the rules and doing some of those grma exercises it gave me just so much more  confidence so grma is definitely something that I want to focus on avoid this trap I know that there  are a lot of videos of people who claim that they achieved fluency by self-studying a

language and  if it works for you that's completely fine but I've noticed that it just doesn't work for me and  I think that it's not going to work for people who are extroverts according to my research extroverts  make up from 50 to 74% of the population so it's the majority of people but to be honest with you  it's hard for me to decide if I'm an extrovert or an introvert because I really like spending  a lot of time alone but on the other hand I also also like spending time with people and I 

feel like meetings with other people only give me more energy especially with the people that I  like I don't even know if it makes sense because people claim that you can be either extrovert or  an introvert but I really feel like a part of my personality is an extrovert and I noticed that  conversations with other people or some language classes really give me more motivation to study  self-studying a language can be very demanding for extroverts and it can be also hard to have  those natural

conversations on your own or maybe even impossible I believe that the main purpose  of the language is to actually communicate with other people and if you only self study a language  this part is missing so there are a few options for people like me you can either join a language  course or find your own tutor or find a language partner this time I decided to go for for the most  pricey option but I think the most effective one which is finding my own tutor I've already found  my Spanish tutor

and I will join classes once a week and study a lot on my own as well the reason  why I think that having your own tutor is the best option of all is that classes are intensive  and adjusted to your needs you can practice all the time and get constructive feedback I noticed  that I actually need somebody to tell me to do my homework I need some external motivation so this  is my plan for the next 10 months I think that if you follow the exact formula that I shared with  you you can easily becom

e fluent in any language you want and I hope it was helpful I will try it  out myself so if you subscribe to my channel you will see my future videos where I talk about my  progress and probably more of language learning tips if you have the same issue as me that you can  understand a foreign language but cannot speak it I share with you how to change it in one of the  videos that is visible on the screen because I went through this process while learning English  and German and if you wonder if

it makes sense to learn multiple languages at the same time I also  have an experience of learning English German and Spanish at the same time and I did a research on  this topic so if you are interested in it check out the other video that is visible on the screen  see you there and thank you for for watching