Learn to Speak a Language for your Trip in the Five Weeks 

Can you learn to speak a language in five weeks? Not to complete fluency. However, you can make a great deal of progress in the next five weeks. Follow these five steps to learn how to speak a language for your trip abroad in the next five weeks.

How long does the language you want to speak take? 

This is a hugely important factor in learning a language, time. If you want to learn a language that’s really closely related to English like, French, Spanish, or Italian, you can invest between 750 and 1,000 hours of focused, immersive, input and practice, and hit a very basic level of fluency. Those hours are researched-based. They’re done by the US government, and they’re used to prepare people for their missions in embassies and counselors abroad. Most of us aren’t like these people, however, where we get uninterrupted time to focus on learning a new language and do nothing else. However, I think it’s a really good rule of thumb to give an idea of how long it takes to learn to speak a language.

If you want to speak a language that’s a bit more different from English, like Russian, or Polish, or Lithuanian, think about taking twice as long to hit that same level of fluency. If you want to talk about languages that are completely different-think really far away from England- think Japanese, Korean, Arabic. There’s very little that those languages share culturally or linguistically with English, and they have a completely different writing system. To hit that same level of basic fluency, it’s going to take three times as long. To be a CEFR-B2 level (intermediate high speaker of that language) which gives you very basic survival functioning in a language, that’s how long it’s going to take. 

Think about the next five weeks. 

 Do you want to go to Italy, order wine and impress your friends? Order meals on your trip to Paris? You don’t need 1,000 hours or 2,000 hours to do that. You can accomplish a great deal towards learning to speak a language well enough in the next five weeks.

Think about what time you have over the five weeks. If we talked about 1,000 hours to have a decent level of basic fluency in a language like Spanish for an English speaker, imagine what you can do with 100 hours. Divide that time over the next five weeks. That’s a couple hours a day. 

Let’s say that you don’t have that much time. Maybe it’s just an hour a day or so that you have to study. That’s still 35 hours. You can learn quite a few words and phrases for your trip. It’s a great start. 

Do you commute? If you ride in your car, a lot of audio programs are really great, as well as podcasts. Maybe you take the train into work. You can use your phone, make your own playlist, journal, speak. You can learn an entire language on your phone with the technology that’s available today. So think about it. Over the next five weeks you can make a serious dent in your language skills using time you already have slightly differently, perhaps listening while you clean the house, or do your errands.

Decide what your materials are going to be. 

Much of my life has been spent with language materials. It’s my passion and my job. There’s so many great things out there, but depending on the purpose you want to use them for, they’re not always particularly useful. 

Think back to a high school textbook. You might start on the first chapter on level one with greetings, and then,