Learn Any Language In An Hour?

Tim Ferriss (notable as the author of the ever-popular book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich) posted a long and fascinating post on his personal blog entitled How To Learn (But Not Master) Any Language In 1 Hour. In it, he gives an overview of his process for “deconstructing” a language to distill it down to its component parts. How is this possible? It’s actually quite simple and can be applied to your Spanish learning regimen without disturbing your studies.

Deconstructing A Language

On the outset, Ferriss asks himself three simple questions to determine whether or not the language is learn-able in a short period of time. Some won’t be and it seems to depend mostly on your native language and past language learning experience (your first foreign language is always the most difficult).

1. Are there any grammatical structures likely to cause particular trouble? For Spanish, the answer to this question will pretty much always be no.
2. Are there vowel sounds that will cause trouble for the learner? Again, the answer for Spanish is no. Spanish vowels are very simple to pronounce for most English speakers.
3. How similar is it to languages I already speak? For those of you who already speak another romance language, Spanish will be cinch. If English is your only language, you will have some difficulty with concepts like the subjunctive. That said, Spanish isn’t so terribly different from English that you will have serious troubles.

After determining it’s worth the effort, you simply follow Ferriss’s ideas for deconstructing the language and reconstructing the basic grammatical structure with the help of a native speaker. Will you be fluent after a few hours of this? Of course not, but you’d be extremely surprised how well you could do. Tim’s post is well worth a read for any language learner (and his book is well worth a read for anybody).