Hey Bob,

If you’ve ever put in the hours with a language and still felt absolutely rubbish at it... you may have been blaming the wrong person.

In this week’s video, I play you a perfectly normal conversation in German.

Nobody’s speaking particularly fast. But unless German is already your language, you’ll probably catch a word or two at best.

Then I play you some more German. This time it’s Dr Stephen Krashen, probably one of the most famous language researchers in the world.

And I’m guessing you’ll follow it. Not every word, but you’ll know what’s going on.

Same language. So... what changed?

Well, you didn’t get any cleverer in those few minutes. You just had enough clues to work out what he meant.

And that’s what your brain needs to pick up a language: lots of language it can actually follow.

Not perfectly.

Just well enough to keep up.

Which makes that old suspicion that you’re “bad at languages” look a bit shaky, doesn’t it?

See, most learners aren’t getting nearly enough of that kind of language.

Surrounding yourself with native speakers doesn’t help much when you’re starting out (it all flies straight past you).

But there’s a surprisingly easy way to get loads of it.

It’s easy enough that it feels a bit like cheating, frankly.

I’ll show you how in this week's video. You can watch the whole thing here​

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Chat soon,

Olly

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