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Notes and highlights for

Fluent in 3 Months
Benny Lewis

Introduction: My Story, Your Passion

The missing ingredient, and the single thing I have found that separates successful language
learners from unsuccessful ones, is a passion for the language itself.

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Spend time with natives of the language, listen to streamed radio, watch TV shows and
movies, or read books in the language, and you will spark your passion, which will motivate
much more progress than any side benefit could ever hope to inspire.

Chapter 2: Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It

You simply have to put in as much work as you can, as intensively as you can, with as much
emphasis on solving immediate language problems as you possibly can in order to progress.

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Be sure to push yourself outside your comfort zone. If the goal you’ve set for yourself has a
100 percent chance of success, then frankly you aren’t aiming high enough.

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Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most.

Chapter 3: How to Learn Thousands of Words Quickly

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You need to create an amusing, animated, and unforgettable image, or even a short story,
whenever you come across a new word or phrase you want to remember in order to stick it to
something in your mind.

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Who are you? Where are you from? What do you do for a living? Why are you learning this
language? These phrases are used so frequently, in fact, you might as well just memorize the
script

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Find translations of a handful of typical phrases like “What does that mean?”

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Write a short introduction to your personal story, answering the question “Why are you
learning this language?” first in English.

Chapter 4: Immersion Without Buying a Plane Ticket

You must speak the language with other human beings.

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Italki.

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Use tandem instead.

Chapter 5: Speaking from Day One

“What does [fill in the blank] mean?” (Or “What does that mean?”)

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If I am Skyping someone for my first conversation, I’ll leave open a text file with a list of
things I want to say and some tough words I haven’t learned well enough
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Always go for “close enough” and search your mind for words that have similar meanings,
even if they aren’t necessarily synonymous.

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When you come to an aspect in your course that you don’t feel is super relevant to you right
now, skip it.

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Listen for any particular words or segments of a person’s speech that you can understand, and
extrapolate what is being said from that.

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I have a strange suggestion for you: spend two weeks learning Esperanto.

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One of the best resources for this I’ve found is Lernu.net.

Chapter 6: Tips for Starting Specific Languages

One of the first things I do when I am learning a language is find a list of these cognates or
similar-looking words.

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With any language, I suggest learning the following modal verbs: can (able to) should would
like to must / have to want to

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words that end in “-tion” in English are very likely to be the same in French,

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There’s also “-tude” (gratitude, magnitude), “-sion” (explosion, expression), “-ment”

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Generally, words that end in a consonant (other than n, s, t, and x) are almost always
masculine, such as franc, lac, bord, pied, shampooing, detail, travail, soleil.

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Words that end in -asion, -sion, -tion, -xion are almost always feminine, such as liaison,
maison, raison, décision, tension, vision, connexion.

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If a word ends in an e, it’s slightly more likely to be feminine, such as façade, salade,
ambulance, thèse, fontaine.

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Exceptions include those words ending in -isme (tourisme), -ède, -ège, -ème (problème,
poème, système), and -age (courage, garage, message, voyage).

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on (“one,” as in “one does not like this”) is used very frequently in place of nous (“we”).

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devoir: to have to, should je dois I have to il/elle/on doit he/she/it/one has to vous devez you
(polite) have to

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For much more on French, see fi3m.com/french.

Chapter 7: From Fluency to Mastery

To reach these upper levels, you have to continue to eliminate plateaus, seriously examine
what your biggest problems are right now, and solve them.

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Thinking in the language for most people refers to your inner dialogue, and I force myself to

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do this from the start.

Chapter 8: How to Get Mistaken for a Native Speaker

I am convinced that this outward appearance and body language are as essential as the things I
mentioned in the previous chapter when reasoning why some locals may feel inclined to
switch back to English.

Chapter 10: Free and Cheap Language Learning 2.0

For an absolute beginner (phrases and words, with very brief grammatical overview), I
suggest a Lonely Planet, Collins, Berlitz, or Assimil phrase book.

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Colloquial and Teach Yourself are two basic book courses that provide very good
representations of the dialogues tourists are likely to have, and they introduce you to some
basic grammar.

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Make sure to see the language-specific summaries at fi3m.com/langs that expand on the
language introductions from chapter 6 and go on to mention recommended learning resources.

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“The difference between a stumbling block and a stepping stone is how high you raise your
foot.” —BENNY LEWIS

Conclusion
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“The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.”

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