Everything you need to know to learn a language

In this video, I'm going to show you exactly how to learn a language from zero to fluency step by step with a dayby-day guide on exactly what to do from the very first day. And we're going to do it together. You, me, him. You're talking to me? Yeah, you and me. Even the shark. These are legitimate methods and principles that I've built up over 9 years of learning languages myself and talking to other language learners about their learning journey. So, I've learned what works and why it works. And in this video, we're going to talk about both. What works and why the two the two things I just said. On my last video, someone suggested a kind of mass language learning experiment in which everyone learns their language together and helps and supports each other. I think that's [music] a fantastic idea. And if you like that idea, leave a comment on this video thanking that person. Their name is Cheryl. And maybe consider sharing this video with another language [music] learning friend or someone who might like to learn a language so that we can all do this together. The more the marrier, that kind of thing. To be a part of this group, you can share stuff to do with your language learning progress on Insta using the hashtag24months of language. And if you happen to like the idea of uploading something to YouTube, even, you know, putting a video on YouTube, that's what YouTube is for, then feel very free to just at me at days and words and that way I'm assured to see your video. But I'll see your posts on Insta. [music] I'll see people's videos on YouTube and I will make a video responding to some of the things. Yeah. Yeah. But what happened to 14 months? What are you just going to pretend that you didn't just [music] add 10 months? Look, it's true. I did say 14 months on the last video, but that's obviously ridiculous. Not because you couldn't get fluent in that [music] time. You possibly could depending on the circumstances, but it's ridiculous because of the inherent suggestion that 14 months has some magical property that 13 months doesn't. There is no magic to [music] any amount of time, be it 3 months or 12 months or even 24 months. If you spend time with your language every single day, you will get better at it with every month that passes. When you spend time with the language, [music] you get to know it better. For this particular group language learning activity, I've chosen 24 months because I think it's a good balance of being the foreseeable future, but also long enough to get very decent at your language. You know what else is very decent? Going to surf.com/lammont. Hang on, dude. It's a little bit early. Come back later. Okay. Oh, okay. Sorry. The first thing we are going to get into in this 24 months is amazingly the first two months. But while we do so, you'll have to trust me that there's a reason that we do it this way. And we're going to get to the reasons as we get to the later months. So the basic structure of this video is the schedule. That is what we're doing. Then some language learning theory and principle and why we do the things that we do to learn our language. and then a little bit at the end about motivation and keeping the habit up. Sound good? No, I don't care. We're doing it anyway. You're going to hear me say this [music] a few times in the video, but I am assuming an example of doing an hour a day. Obviously, if you're doing more than that, then you'll have [music] to increase the amounts of everything that I'm talking about. And if you're doing less, then you'll have to decrease them. And I'm also assuming that for the first 2 months, you're using an audio book and around 80 minutes total of a video and or podcast. [music] Now, I'm going to call it a video for ease sake. Ideally, it will be four videos that are all around 20 minutes each. Now, that doesn't really matter if it's not [music] that. If it's two videos that are 40 minutes or even one video that is 80 minutes, or even one video that's much longer than that, and you're just using the first 80 minutes, it doesn't really matter. So, you'll see throughout this video that you'll have to adjust everything [music] for your specifics. But I would recommend at least the audio book part, particularly if that is an audio book of which you've read or listened to the book already in your language. And just to be clear, in the first month, I'm specifically talking about the first hour of whatever audio book you're using. I don't care if it's war and peace and that's only the first 1% of the [music] book or if it's the complete adventures of Harry McLaren friends by Linley Dodd and that's the whole thing. It matters [music] not. So for the first month we are using the first hour deal with it and we're going to break that hour into two 30inut halves which we are going to call half [music] A and half B. It is a complex naming system I know. As for the first 20 minutes of [music] your video, whether that is a whole video or the first quarter of an 80-minute video, those first 20 minutes we are calling video Q and the second 20 minutes we are calling video R. And here's what we're doing throughout the month. We're going to listen to audiobook sections A and B and watch video sections Q and R around 15 times each. [music] And most of the days you are also going to explicitly learn 12 words. Remember, this assumes [music] an hour a day. If you're doing less, then you listen to less of everything and learn fewer words. If you're doing more, then you can learn more words a day. But I don't care how much you're doing. I wouldn't go above 20 words a day if I were you. Now, at this early stage, if you just learn those words from a frequency list, [music] then that should be completely fine. But if for whatever reason that doesn't work for you, then you might have to pull those words from the content itself. Which is exactly why I recommend an audio book because it's not normally hard to find the book that that audio book comes from. So, you can just find the word that you need to find by looking at the book and then look it up. And yeah, that's why we're using a book [music] and an audio book. So, that's what we're doing. But why? Yeah, you've got us listening to audio books when we don't even speak the language. This is crazy. [music] A lot of people think that learning a language is about learning words and grammar and [music] that the problem and the reason they've been unable to do that so far is [music] consistency. They've been unable to hold themselves to that. And if they just were able to be consistent in studying words and grammar and then have the opportunity to speak to native speakers, then they would learn the language. This is not true. Most people are not going to be consistent with that [music] kind of study anyway because a it's boring obviously for most people and b it's not effective and even if they don't know it's not effective I think they do know that it's not effective on some subconscious level [music] I think we can feel that doing that is not going to result in fluency in the language because it's not what speaking a language fluently actually is is having the necessary cognitive patterns to Voice your thoughts, whatever they may be, in that language. [music] [music] >> [music] >> 650 more dear pass. So in [laughter] Okay. Okay. This is slightly inaccurate, but the easiest way to think about fluency in a foreign language is having your thoughts occur to you in that language as you speak them. In previous videos, I've compared it to walking. When you walk, you balance. You may not even realize that you're doing that. But when you're walking, you're actually balancing [music] all the time, but you don't consciously balance. And in fact, even a toddler learning to walk does not consciously [music] balance. They just develop an instinct to not fall over. I don't know. This sounds like bad news, man. How are you supposed to develop a skill on a subconscious level? It's a good question. It sounds a bit lofty, right? It's like really, we're going to retrain our subconscious [music] to have an entirely new language and develop thoughts in that language. Yep. That's what we're going to do. And how [music] we do that is to first learn to understand the language consciously. And as more of the language becomes consciously understood, some of it starts to become subconsciously understood. When you think about it, you've already done this with small amounts of other languages in the form of mascot [music] words. Mascot words are words from another language which most people know even if they don't actually speak that language. Words like gracias, amigo, tranquilo, bonjour, bonapeti, tankan, afidazen. Chances are that even if you only speak English, if you were to hear those words in any normal context whilst you're listening to English at any time, you would have [music] no problem understanding them. You would understand them subconsciously. And even if you disagree with me on that particular point, you certainly don't need to consciously think about all the language that you hear all the time. You are not doing that now. It's impossible. So that is why when we're learning our new language, whatever that happens to be, we get repeat exposure to decent amounts of the real language because that is the process we're starting. We are wanting to move towards that subconscious comprehension [music] of all the language. By the way, I am making this plan available as a downloadable file. It's free in [music] the description. If you appreciate the effort that's gone into it or this video or any of my videos, you can also make a donation. I've got a suggested price of 365 because that's a cent per day of the plan. You can do more if you want or you can do less. But if you don't want to pay anything, just put zero. And I hope you find it useful. Now to our second month. I'm using the real February of 2026 here just to make it easy. But obviously your timing may vary. What we're going to do now is to introduce new material, but ideally it will be related to the material that you've been already using [music] to learn. Whether this is indeed the second hour of that same audio book or a completely different audio book, it doesn't [music] matter. Either way, we are going to break it into two 30inut halves again and we're going to call those halves C and D. Do try to keep up with the naming system, but we're also not done with those first two half hours, A and B. I know that looking at two whole months altogether like this makes the repetition seem completely insane, but [music] this isn't actually that much repetition. At this point, you've only listened to each piece of the audio book between 12 and 16 times. Now, that sounds like heaps, but that's because you're comparing it to listening in a language [music] that you already speak fluently. That is not apples and apples. That's not apples and oranges. That's apples and atom bombs. [music] I am promising you that this repeated exposure is a very efficient way to gain subconscious comprehension of an entirely new language. >> Okay, great. so I can learn to subconsciously comprehend a [clears throat] language. Who cares? I want to speak it, not just understand it. Yeah, a fair point. But here's the thing. You can't say what [music] you don't understand. If you can't easily comprehend something that is said to you without giving it a second thought, then you certainly won't be able to say that thing very easily either or anything that is equally complex. If you were to learn all the languages grammar, its so-called rules, its conjugation of verbs, its word definitions, etc., [music] Then sure, you may be able to produce some of the language correctly some of the time, but doing it that way, you will always [music] have to think through what you're going to say before you say it. I call this running the numbers on your [music] speech. Hey, I have a question for you. What's 10 * 10? 10 * 10? That would be 78. I always knew you were stupid. Okay, that was obviously dumb. [music] You could tell that I was faking when I was thinking about it because not only do you know what 10 * 10 is, but everyone knows what it is. And no one needs to give it a second thought. You don't even need to run the numbers on that. No one does. Hit me again. What's 43 * 17? Times up. Tell me if you did get it within that time, but it's 731. Most of you will not have gotten it within that time because you did need to run the numbers on it. Hear me well. If you learn a language or if you think you're learning a language primarily by studying rules, [music] then you will end up speaking the language like you're doing long multiplication. You'll speak slowly all the time, but you'll probably still make a lot of mistakes because the rules aren't always rules. Languages are not maths. And [music] it actually takes longer to learn a language like that because your conscious brain is really not designed for that kind of thing. Your subconscious brain is very much designed [music] for language learning. In fact, it's often thought that the innate capacity for language is the biggest thing that separates humans [music] from other mammals. So, whatever you believe about where we got this innate capacity, whether you believe that God granted us the capacity or we evolved the capacity or God ensured that we would evolve that capacity, the upshot is that you as a human have a very strong innate linguistic [music] capacity, but it doesn't sit at the conscious level. It sits at the subconscious level and that just does not align well with learning [music] a language according to rules. So, how do you learn grammar? Because if you just go saying words willy-nilly, you'll say a bunch of stuff that doesn't mean anything. Kind of like when you go to a website and it's like this content is unavailable. >> Uh-huh. [laughter] And what can we do about that? Surf Shark. >> Get Surf SharkVPN. >> There it is. >> Yeah, I know you think you've seen a VPN app before. >> Just a couple. But Surf SharkVPN is an all-in-one internet safety package for every device in your household, including all these. What do you criminal? But yes, all those are covered. Does it have a data breach alert? >> Yes. Alternative ID generator? >> Yes. Safe search? Yes. Antivirus? Yes. Is Lamont the best? Yes. What? No. Surf SharkVPN is the best. Well, okay, then. What about a virtual private network to mask your IP address? >> Of course. That's literally what VPN stands for. Oh, okay. You should just get it already. [music] How do we get it? You can use the QR code on screen or go to surfshark.com/lamont. That's surfshark.com/lamont. L a m o n t. >> Hey, I just said that and I was about to say that when you do, you can get a great deal and 4 months extra. The link will also be in the description and at the top of the comments. >> Hey, shut up already. I'm doing your job for you. >> Yeah, well, I'm better at it. To get the great VPN and other security features at [music] a great price, go to surfac.com/lamont. Okay, back to that loser guy. That was unnecessary. You're unnecessary. Damn. Anyway, where were we? Grammar. Oh, yeah. Grammar. Okay. So, a lot of people confuse learning with studying. So, they [music] think, well, you need to learn grammar and therefore you need to study grammar in order [music] to learn the language properly. Wrong. By learning the language, [music] you will learn grammar. And you don't need to study grammar in order to learn grammar because you will learn it through learning the language. Now, you can study grammar if you want to, but you don't need to. When you learn to comprehend the language, you are by definition learning what things mean. You know, for example, the difference between [music] James bit the dog and the dog bit James or that's James' [music] bit and that's the dog's bit. But the dog bit James' bit and James bit the dog's bit. If you spend enough [music] time with passages of the language, pieces of the language if you will, you will learn to comprehend them. And as you do so more and more, you'll start to [music] get an intuitive feel for the thing that we call grammar, which is really just the way that the language uses and manipulates words to create and convey different meanings. And look, I say that knowing full well that I will get backlash to that. Every time I say it, I get [music] a group of people, maybe small, maybe large, saying, "Oh, wow, Lamont, you're so clever. You just learn the language and that way you learn grammar and you don't actually need to explicitly study grammar." Gee, why hadn't I thought of that? [music] Because you were 3 years old, but you were already doing it then. You were just a lot more patient back then because you didn't realize it was happening, but it was. Now, unfortunately, sometime between [music] then and now, we've all gradually picked up this idea that we can only ever learn things [music] through conscious study. Now, that is not true of any field, and it's especially not true of language. So, all of that brings [music] us back to learning to comprehend the language. And the way we do that is by listening to it all the time, every day. Even at the very start when we can't understand very much. It may be uncomfortable to spend time with language when you [music] don't understand it. But you can still spend time with it. But that's boring. >> Is it though? Think about this. On the very first day of the very first month, you'll understand essentially zero. But by the end of that month, you'll [music] understand anywhere up to 100% of your chosen passage because you'll have heard it. so many times and you'll have learned 600 words. Sorry, that's up to 600 words, but a lot of words in any case. Now, at either extreme, 0% or 100% or anywhere in between, I don't think that it's boring [music] because if we're talking 0%, then it's just white noise. It's just like the sound of a fan. That's not boring. And then I know 100% even just of that passage might be an extreme example, but there will be some people in some languages who can reach that. And if you're really getting to 100% comprehension in just 31 days, then your comprehension of just that passage must be skyrocketing. It might be uncomfortable. It might be extreme, but it's not boring. Okay, fine. But that's just one piece of the language. That doesn't help me speak the whole language. Yes, it does, though. The whole language is just made up of lots of pieces of the language. What's the first rule of Fight Club? Most of you will know what the first rule of Fight Club is, even if you haven't seen Fight Club because that is just such a famous piece of the English language. Now, to be or not to be, that is the question. I don't know the rest of it, but that's just a 400-year-old version of what's the first rule of Fight Club. >> Look around. I look around. I see a lot of new faces, which means a lot of you have been breaking the first two rules of Fight Club. >> They're all just pieces of the language. And granted, some pieces of the language are much much more famous than other pieces of the language, but everything you read and hear forms a part of that language. And if you get repetitive exposure to these pieces of the language, it starts slowly building up the whole language in your brain. Each insect thing that comes in spring to gladden this sad earth, it flits and whirls and pipes and skulls and chirps in mocking mirth. A merry song the whole day long to see the swank abroad. That was just a piece of English. It's a much less [music] famous piece than Fight Club or Hamlet, but it's a piece of the language that formed part of my comprehension of English. But when there's so many pieces of the language, why do we need to just listen to one passage 31 times? Because we're not yet [music] familiar enough with the language that we can afford to move on any faster. If you listen to 31 different hours of content [music] in 31 hours of learning, you're asking too much of your brain. You get one opportunity to understand something. And if you don't, too bad. we're on to the next thing. Now, of course, your comprehension does [music] gradually increase this way, but it is slower. So, to learn to comprehend more quickly, we instead get repeated exposure, all the while learning the words and phrases that are contained within that [music] passage or passages. In the last video, I recommended trying to find things that have transcripts [music] and said that for that reason, my go-to was audio books. Oh man, I'd rather listen to songs or watch movies. Sure, fine. I mean, you can do that if you want, whatever. But when it [music] comes to finding something that has a perfect transcript almost every single time and is really really well suited to language learning, very [music] little can beat an audio book because it's literally just the language the entire time. And do not hear this as me bashing music, okay? I [music] freaking love music. I've got a music degree. Not that that means you love music, but I happen to love music as well. But five minutes of an audio book is going to contain over 700 words. A five minute song is not. Five minutes of a movie is not. [music] There is an inherent language learning advantage to something that is just sentences that [music] form part of a cohesive narrative read aloud by a professional narrator the entire time. The other advantage of an audio book is that it's not normally [music] very hard to find one that you have either read in your native language or can at least find in your native language [music] to read or listen to so that you can prime your brain with the story. So, after 2 months [music] of listening to your chosen content for between 30 and 100 hours and having explicitly studied between 300 [music] and 1,000 words, you should be getting some very decent comprehension of that content. Now you're going to choose new material and do the same thing the next month, but this time you won't be starting anywhere near zero comprehension. If you were to grab, say, the next chunk of chapters from that same audio book, you could be starting as high as 50% [music] comprehension or even more. This is a good thing. The aim for these early months is to spend as much time in that 50 to 90% comprehension range. Now, there is research that suggests we are at our ideal language learning rate when we're at about 85% or higher, but that's not realistic in the [music] first 3 months. If your material is different enough and you feel like you've dropped back in comprehension [music] to as little as 20 or even 15%, that's still okay because that probably means that in your first [music] 2 months with whatever your chosen material was, you went from zero comprehension to say [music] like 60 or even 70% comprehension. And now you're feeling bad because you're back at 20. But think about it, you're now starting at 20 for the third month. You're definitely going to get further this time. There is still a lot of time to go. We're still not even up to the 60th day if at the start of the third month. So, just be patient. Take it easy. But what if I can understand a lot of it already? Do I still listen to each chunk 15 times? [music] No. If at any stage you feel like you're understanding too much too easily by sheer weight of repetition, then that means the repetition is working. Move on to new material. But do keep in mind that if you only give yourself one opportunity to understand something and you don't understand it, then you've kind of wasted your opportunity to learn that word or phrase because you may have learned it very easily on the second or third hearing of it, but you moved on to something else, so you didn't get that chance. Choose material that makes sense given this principle. Repetition breeds comprehension. Comprehension breeds [music] learning. Learning breeds further comprehension which eventually breeds more learning and comprehension and so on and that breeds automaticity and [music] finally fluency. You can kind of think of it as the repetition being there to jumpstart the comprehension. But comprehension is the flywheel that keeps the [music] whole learning engine turning. So months three and four are basically the same except that we can work in some new material a little bit faster. Remember, you can decide how much repetition you're doing based on your comprehension figure. And don't forget to occasionally go back and reconsume the stuff from the first two months. It's not just good for your language learning, it's also a really useful reminder of just how far you've come. Now, in the last video when I laid out the plan and said basically keep doing this for the first [music] 6 months, some people wanted me to get really specific into exactly what to do every day and with what resources and everything. I'm sorry, but I can't even be that [music] specific for one language, never mind whatever language you happen to be learning. Your language is going to have to [music] be specific to you depending on how much you're doing, how fast you're progressing, etc., etc. So, we've just talked about months 3 and four, [music] but months 5 to 10 inclusive should look something like this. [music] Now, what you're seeing here still assumes an hour a day. Again, you can adjust as per your schedule. It's not rocket science. And by the way, you don't have to be dogmatic about not speaking the language. You can, of course, speak the language if you want to or if you're in the place and you need to. It's just that a lot of people misunderstand the role of [music] speaking within language learning. Logically, you would assume that speaking the language is what produces fluency since how you demonstrate fluency is speaking it. But that's like saying that winning at sport is what makes you good [music] at sport. It's the other way around. You win because you're good and you can speak [music] because you're fluent. >> Okay. But what about match practice? Playing the sport for real is not the same thing as being on the training ground. >> Yep. Absolutely. Match practice is a real thing. It has a real benefit. And that's where speaking [music] the language as part of learning the language comes into play. But no professional athlete plays real competition games more than they train. Think about this. If you're trying to practice a [music] language by speaking it before you really understand that language very well, then what is it that you are really practicing? Really, what what are you practicing? If you don't even comprehend the language very well. You can definitely practice using a word that you understand [music] and you just haven't happened to have to say yet and you want to practice using it. That's a real thing. But [music] you cannot practice a word that you don't even know exists. So in this schedule, I haven't included any speaking practice in the first [music] 10 months. But you can start early on it if you want. By the end of this 10 months, you should have spent a minimum of 150 hours learning your language, possibly as much as 600 hours, and you may even understand a lot of the language automatically. Now, it's going to depend a lot on the total number of hours [music] put in, as well as if we're talking about a Swede learning Dutch or a Brit learning Thai or a shark learning my favorite language. Okay. What's your favorite language? Finnish. Get it? Finnish. Okay. So, anyway, in the 11th month, we're going to start speaking. [music] First, we're going to get sentences from all the stuff we've been using to learn our language or new stuff if you're already understanding a lot of it automatically. And you're going to choose between four and 10 sentences a day. And you're going to repeat those sentences the way the native speaker from your language material says them. Now, I said this in my last video, but it bears repeating. Focus on the pronunciation, [music] the accent, and the emotion with which the native speaker says them. Don't just try to say the sentences. Perform them as if you're auditioning in that language. [music] And >> [music] [music] >> more. Try to sound and feel as much like the original as possible. And repeat each sentence around 20 times, which should then take about 4 minutes if you're doing it carefully. So that's between 15 and 40 [music] minutes that you're going to spend on this. Now, for that hardcore group, the 40minute group, that [music] should only be done if you are spending a whole 2 hours a day or more on your target language. You're not doing 40 minutes out of 40 minutes. You're doing 40 minutes out of longer, like 2 [music] hours. And these sentences can be kind of fun if you hit a bit of a flow state, which you may on some days. But in general, this [music] is tough going because you're taking words and grammar and you're practicing automating those meanings as sending [music] signals from your brain to your mouth as mouth movements essentially. For the remaining time in each day, you'll continue to watch and listen and get exposure to the language, but now with a lot less repetition [music] because you'll understand so much more of it more easily. Okay, so we do this for 2 months. That takes us to the end of the year, but we've still got the whole year to go, don't we? While I could give you a schedule for the second year, it would be a little bit pointless because you're going to know much better than me and better than anyone now what you should be doing more of or less of based on your target language, what your goals in that language are, [music] and how far you've come so far. If you're following this to the letter, then what you haven't done yet is turned your own thoughts [music] into the language. Now, there are a lot of things you can do here. Some people would recommend writing before you try and speak to just practice getting your thoughts from your [music] brain out. I only like to write when it's for some kind of end [music] like an article or a video which is why I would prefer to just go and book a lesson or even find a friend who is a native speaker of that language and just talk to them. Even just writing with them on WhatsApp or something like that, that's a good start. Now, you probably don't need to do as much speaking as [music] you might think that you need to do. If you just speak every couple of days now that you're up around the 400 hour mark or if you've been doing more then you're up at around the 800 hour mark. You'll find that your speaking ability takes off quite quickly. Now listen to this carefully. It is not true that the more you do of something, the better you will get at it. It depends. When I was 16, I could type with the same [music] speed and accuracy roughly as I can now. Because when I was 16, I'd been typing for around 6 or 7 years and I could spell. And that was as much progress as I needed to make with typing to do what I needed to do. 20 years later, it is exactly the same. Now that you've started speaking beyond a certain point, that is probably not as many hours as you think. If you just speak more and more, you will not get better unless you make a concerted effort to include more words and phrases and to speed up your speech and just make your speech better in general. Otherwise, it's not going anywhere. When you [music] speak the language, you are training at speaking, yes, but you are not learning the language as you speak. The language isn't going into you. You are not learning new [music] words or phrases. You are maybe speeding up the things you already know. and the ability to say those out loud, [music] but you are not getting better at speaking in that you're becoming more eloquent or increasing your vocabulary. You need a concerted effort to do that. So, you should still be listening to and reading and in general consuming the language, but by the second year, you'll be able to get a much broader variety of material because it'll be so much easier to understand everything. However, remember that you probably still don't understand everything. In fact, at just the end of the first year, I'd be very surprised if you did understand [music] everything. So remember, the goal is always to promote the language as part of your conscious and subconscious processes by getting more exposure to it. And the more exposure you can get to it, the better. Which brings me to the question of motivation and focus. Now, I know it might seem very easy for me to sit here instructing you on how to learn a language whilst only in very small part showing my progress in a language, which by the way, I've been learning for a lot longer than 2 years. But I have also in the time that I've been studying languages learned a lot about failure and drive and setting myself up for success. Around 10 months ago, I was very excited to have found a passion for a new language. And that was rare. That was something that hadn't really happened since Swedish, which had was 7 years earlier. But then just a few months later, my life circumstances changed [music] to the point that it wasn't really feasible for me to go on learning that language. And that phase of my life lasted for around [music] 6 months. And it's sort of still going on. And then I had to go to Sweden and film a [music] bunch of unrelated music things. In other words, I lived the life of a human, right? We all have stuff going on. But I was really sad about the fact that I had been quite invested [music] in this language for a short time and then all my momentum in it had been disrupted by this [music] other thing. And then I was writing this video, seriously, this video here. And I started thinking, okay, so now I do have time to learn the language. If I want, I could prioritize that. And I know how to do it because that's what I've just been telling you. So, which is it going to be? Am I going to say, "Okay, it's not great that I lost those 6 months and let's pick up back where I left off." Or am I just going to say, "Okay, forget it. Language learning is too hard." Which one [music] is going to be more disappointing to me in the future? What you will often hear here on YouTube and in motivational books and all that kind of thing is that life is all about consistency. Just show up every day. That's what you'll hear. I don't like that. I've [music] got to be honest because that means that if you don't show up one day or 2 days or a week or 6 months, then you've [music] failed or at least you'll feel like you've failed. which is why I don't like it because language learning or learning anything or progress of any kind is not about showing up every day. I disagree. It's about showing up on enough of the days. I know that since I began learning Swedish 8 years ago, on well over half the days, in those eight years, well over half the days, I have not gotten any exposure to Swedish. Literally none. [music] which means by default that however many days it is that I have been exposed to Swedish is enough to get me to the level that I am at now. So look, you might be now 55 and [music] cursing the time that you stopped learning your language when you were 22. You haven't shown up every day. You haven't been consistent since then. But that doesn't mean [music] that you can't show up on enough of the days now to learn your language. So I hope you found this video helpful. Leave me a comment if you did. If you want this plan as a dayby-day document for the first year so that you can read it really easily, I've made that document available for free. Link in the description. And for Surf SharkVPN, don't forget Surf [music] Shark. >> Yes. And of course, thanks to Surf SharkVPN for making this video possible. Go to surf shark.com/lamont or use code lamont l at checkout to get four extra months of Surf SharkVPN. [music]