How Long Does It Take To Become Fluent In A Language? Polyglot Gabriel Silva Tackles The Question!

Gabriel discusses how long it takes to become fluent in a foreign language and shares a story from the days of his youth (what does Judo have to do with language learning???) Video transcript: http://fluentasap.com/?p=241 (and below) Good evening! Today I would like to talk about fluency in a language and my point of view in regards to fluency is that people just need to calm down about fluency already. Ok? it’s like… People are just like first: “How long? How long is it going to take me to become fluent in whatever language. That’s like, a lot of people’s main concert. It just reminds me as well of a story about my… The days of my youth. I think I was three years old and my mother loves telling and retelling the story just to show people how impatient I was as a child. I started judo, okay? When I was three years old and my mother’s right, I was never a patient child. Never. Um… So, you know, I went to like three, three lessons I think and then I was already like: “Well, I was thinking when… When do I get this black belt? You know, I’ve come three times, I want the black belt! And so apparently, I actually asked the “Sensei” I went to the Sensei and I asked: “When do I get the black belt? You know, this is taking too long already!” And in… in my eyes (in my eyes) I think that that’s what a lot of people are like in terms of learning languages: “When do I get the black belt?” You know, when do I get fluent in the language? Two months? Three months? Five months? A year? A decade from now? First, there are so many factors, so many factors that are going to influence how long it’s gonna take. Whether or not you already know a language similar to the one that you’re learning because that’s obviously going to help. For instance, if you know Portuguese really well, learning Spanish will be… It will take a lot less time than learning Chinese it has a lot of similar vocabulary. Second: how much effort you put into it. In the end if you’re using really efficient methods of course you may speed up the process in terms of months and years, weeks, whatever if you… it’s also gonna depend on how much… how many hours you put in like every day or every week, or whatever. If you’re… If you can only spend 15 minutes a day learning the language well, it might take a while to get fluent in it the if you have eight hours a day to spend learning a language then, hey… You may language in record time and become fluent. In the end, I think that the most important is for people to just enjoy the process, you know? To relax a bit really and really be more zen in terms of learning a language and accept that it’s not gonna happen overnight. It’s going to take effort, it’s going to take dedication.. But hey, the most important thing is that it can be an enjoyable process and you should make it, you should make it an enjoyable process. That way you can learn faster anyway. You can become fluent faster if you enjoy the process than if you hate it. If you don’t like it and you think it’s painful and you think: “I can’t wait to get done with this finally learn this language”. Then, you’re not going to be learning as quickly. That’s… That’s the thing!