Welcome to Fail Your Way to Fluency

Learning a language is a process of failing and failing and failing and failing until you fail less!

“Bonjour-Hello!” as the staff at one hotel chain greet people.

Welcome to the Fail Your Way to Fluency blog. My name is James Kirchner.

I am a fluent speaker of more than 75 foreign languages, and two or three dialects of at least 25 of those languages. I can make myself understood almost everywhere in the world, and have found enormous self-fulfillment and business success as a result. And the most amazing thing of all is that when I was a year old, I couldn’t speak any languages at all!

My success in languages is not due to any special talent, but to a few simple tricks that I will teach you through this blog. You also will speak many languages so perfectly that people will think you have been speaking them all your life! Just follow my simple plan, and you will also be a true citizen of the world, speaking a seemingly limitless number of foreign tongues as fluently as a diplomat! And don’t be nervous — you’ll learn all of them effortlessly, the way you did as a child!

That was all a lie!

I can’t speak 75 foreign languages. I can get along pretty well speaking Czech, French and German. In those languages I can have conversations above the elementary level — sometimes at much higher than an elementary level, if I know the subject matter. I can read and listen to the news in those languages, and I can get through moderately difficult books in them. I understand a bit of some other languages, but can’t speak or write them. Among those languages are Spanish, Russian, Slovak, Slovene and Swedish. (Notice that these are related to the languages I am better at, so half my work was already done when I set out to learn them.)

If you have this sort of mix of languages in your head, you can understand further languages that you’ve never studied. For example, I can navigate a Polish, Portuguese or Dutch website, because those languages are similar to others I know. For the same reason, I was once able to read a website in Galician, even though I had never seen the language before and hadn’t known it existed. It has been a lot of work to get to this point, but I’ve managed it in such a way that it wasn’t all tedium.

Beware of exaggerations!

Anyone who says he can fluently function in 75 languages is lying. From time to time I run across people who make the equally preposterous claim that they can speak 15 languages “perfectly.” Sometimes the person doesn’t make this assertion himself, but he has that reputation, and other people spread the belief. Anyone who believes he has a perfect command of 15 languages either has never heard a recording of himself speaking them, or he has an ego so huge that he is blind to his mistakes.

Even someone claiming to speak 10 languages fluently is a little suspect. He might speak some of them quite fluently when ordering coffee, but halt and sputter in a real conversation. Some of his languages are bound to start fading as they languish unused for periods of time — it’s a lot of work just to maintain a foreign language, let alone learn one in the first place, and just imagine having to maintain 10 or 15 of them! It would take all your time, even if you were a genius.

There are no shortcuts

This blog will not teach you any simple tricks for stuffing your head with a foreign language. It won’t make you suddenly fluent in a few weeks. I can’t do that for you. Nobody can. You can’t even do it for yourself.

But while I say there are no shortcuts, there are practices and attitudes that will make your language learning more efficient. You might say these really are shortcuts, but in fact they do not make the process short. They ease your gathering of knowledge. They can assist you in developing fluency, and in learning vocabulary and grammar, but anytime you lop off one head of that language dragon, two more appear. Two more words, two more idioms, two more grammatical structures, two more exceptions. Your development never ends in your native language, so in your new one you will never completely “arrive” either.

The main problem is that most people don’t know how to learn a language for actual use. Most people take classes that train them to pass tests, but the knowledge and attitudes you need for that are not the same as those you need when your feet hit the soil where the language is spoken, whether it’s a foreign country or a local office, a social agency or a place of worship.

Succeeding on exams can fool you into thinking you have a “command” over the vocabulary and structures you have studied, and you may be surprised when you find out you can’t control those elements well in the real world. This blog will explain why that is, and how to deal with it.

And one of the biggest obstacles to learning a foreign language can be your ego. We’ll deal with that also.

And most of all remember my proverb that even the kids I help teach taekwondo to recite back to me now:

Anything worth learning is as process of failing and failing and failing and failing until you fail less!

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