Super Speed Language Learning

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Text: Francesco Marelli
Photography: Caroline Hargreaves

Struggling to find the motivation to learn a language? Tired of your progress in improving your idiom skills? Scared to death but willing to attempt learning a new tongue?

For one, you may try putting your Facebook, LinkedIn or email account in Esperanto.

It can be a good exercise for those interested to improve mastery of any one or several Western languages. This enables one to learn all in a rather playful fashion. Although Esperanto is not very widely spoken – being a mix of many, mostly European, languages – it is an explosive cocktail of learning by approximation.

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What are other ways to turbo boosting one’s language skills a little? There are many programs promising this and that, some of them are truly helpful. Still, it may come as no surprise if the author suggests that the focus of action lies on the self. As such, this piece of writing is dedicated to just that, and it truly is beneficial to speak more than one language fluently.


So let’s explore a few tricks accumulated over the last ten years of active language learning.

A golden oldie is hassling a native speaker, or anybody you believe masters the language you are trying to learn at a higher level than your current one. Ask these people to please always correct you, organize informal language practice/exchange with them. According to your preferences, you can ask them to talk to you in the language you are trying to learn, even if you keep speaking your own language or one more comfortable to you.

Try all languages of your mobile phone, email account and other electronic gimmicks you use and do this for a day, week or month at the time; all in the same language or all in different ones to learn, as you prefer. You will be amazed at what you can pick up from this. It does get tricky when you cannot read the script and do not remember the exact menu position of the function “language change”…

Another insight is to study a language you know nothing or very little of, from a language you are partially, not fully, fluent in. This makes you sweat a bit more, but means you practice two languages at once.

Check regularly if your learning is (still) fun. If you find it could be better, try movies, jokes, music and poetry or others, trying to engage yourself as actively as you can. It can be helpful to your learning speed to indeed move beyond “consuming”, i.e. reading, listening or viewing only.

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Do something in the language which terrifies you. A presentation in class or for your colleagues, or a simultaneous translation whilst on holiday with friends or family? Many challenges await you! Throw yourself in the deep.

Try a language of which you think you will never learn or which you find “exotic”. In other words, one that is highly intimidating or you find sounding interesting. Depending on your origins, a few suggestions: Hungarian, Mongolian, Icelandic, Cantonese, Tamil, Swahili…? Or what about learning an ancient language, and potentially soaking up some old truths of the world in it? Quechua, Latin, Persian, Greek, Sanskrit…? One benefit of such challenges is that, whether you eventually give up or not, the experience will tend to make you “relativize” the difficulty of any other languages you are learning. You are basically shifting your horizons of what is easy and what is not, hopefully expanding them and feeling more confident in the process.

When you decide to tackle a completely new language, and you are pressed with time to figure out the basics, try learning 15-20 basic verbs (to do, to be, to go, to take, to return etc.) and their declinations, and construct yourself a 400 – 500 words vocabulary of fruits, colors, common objects, animals, basic phrases or any other category you think serves your daily speech. Once you have this basis, especially useful in a language to which you have no linguistic ties, or in which you are totally blind to structure, and roots of words and verbs, you can slowly add new elements to it every day.

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Lastly, it can be useful, especially when motivation drops a little at times, to check why you want to learn this language. Ensuring your desire is renewed and/or coming from a good place inside of you will ensure fewer lapses of motivation and draw the good energies in your head that will thrust your learning forward.

Dear reader, I hope you have found some elements of interest in this short article which can give you that little edge you were looking for, which lay dormant inside of you waiting to be unleashed.

Russians say that with every new language one acquires a new soul. Depending on how and why you learn a language, I found it to be a useful insight, and true for me.

Russians also say that repetition is the mother of learning. Indeed, however brilliant a language program is, self-taught or taught, remember that there is a good old truth in the art of repetition. It is up to you of course, to try and flavor this repetition a bit, so as not to bore yourself out of learning the language.

Have fun, and I wish you a lot of interesting and enriching new souls.


Francesco Marelli is Italian and is currently a managing assistant at the World Peace Academy in Basel, Switzerland. He gained his MA in Peace and Conflict Studies from the European Peace University. Francesco’s interest in languages has been constant through his life. Currently, and in order of proficiency, he enjoys English, Dutch, Italian, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Portuguese, Romanian, Modern Standard Arabic, Hindi, and Modern Greek.