99 Benny Lewis ∙ fluentin3months.com ∙ foreign languages My TOP 3 articles: What is the best language learning course? Looking at the numbers The smartest decision you will ever make to achieve fluency The only way to get far quickly is to get out of your comfort zone (my typical day learning Mandarin) About me: I graduated university with a degree in engineering and moved to Spain. After living there for six months, I still couldn't communicate in Spanish despite trying through studying and classes. This is when I changed my learning approach to be more communicative and it has allowed me to learn multiple languages relatively quickly. Years later, I now run the largest language learning blog in the world, have written an international best selling book on language learning, and speak at conferences (like TEDx) regularly on language learning. I started learning languages very slowly as I tried and tested various different approaches. It took me about a year total, while living in Spain, but I eventually reached a level good enough to sit and pass the DELE C2 exam from the Instituto Cervantes. I also sat the French B2 exam 9 months into my stay in France, and then went on to live in France and Quebec longer to bring my French up to a level such that I could translate engineering documents for a living. I have similarly improved other languages either to a professional level, or to at least a conversational level. While I don't have certificates to confirm my levels, my estimate would be that I have: C1 or C2 in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese B2 in Esperanto, Italian B1 in Irish and A2 in Mandarin, Dutch and American Sign Language. For about the next year, I'm going to focus on improving my current languages, rather than learning new ones, although I may have quick week or two long projects, depending on my travels.
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