One of the biggest challenges we face as we grow older is learning something new, especially languages. Our mother tongue, English, or Hindi, for example, has been in front of us since we were born. We have caught up enough with these languages to hold conversations. Although we don’t always have a great vocabulary, we know enough to communicate freely without language being the primary barrier.
But when it comes to learning a new language, we lack those subconscious neural patterns, unlike our core languages, which have been operational in our brains forever. It feels hard, it seems impossible if you attempt it, and it is often tiresome or scary.
It’s a challenge. How can you go about learning a new language, and that too, quickly? If I had 30 days and spent about 1 hour every day learning a new language, how far would I go, and how much would I learn? Would I be able to communicate easily with someone who has been natively speaking that language? How challenging would it be?
Learning French in 30 Days – The Plan
- Make a list of words most common in French.
- Read a French book and read it again and again until a pattern shows up.
- Watch YouTube videos and watch them repetitively.
- Take notes rigorously.
- Start forming basic sentences on my own.
- Ask ChatGPT to translate all my day-to-day sentences into French.
- Review the conversation with ChatGPT and play it repeatedly. (Super cool)
- Watch French movies and Netflix series.
- Talk to myself in French.
- Rinse and repeat for 1 month.
So, that’s the plan. I plan to do this for about 1 month, track my progress, and get back here to log my updates. Nothing is as hard as it seems in the beginning—at least, as long as you are not sending starships to Mars or building Linux from scratch. Let’s see how it goes.