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⚪ Watch the video without subtitles**
⚪ Watch the video again with Portuguese Subtitles (click the CC button)
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⚪ Review your phrases using Lingophant

** Don’t try to understand right now, just pay attention to the melody of the language

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Full Translation

Hey, what’s up? 

In this video, I’ll tell you how I learned 5 days by myself and without ever leaving the country. Well, the first language I learnt was English and English, in fact, I learnt it by taking a course. I actually started taking the course and the course helped me to get out of the basics, but after four years of course, I still didn’t feel that I was fluent in English. And the first time I saw a native, I couldn’t do anything at all. And at that point, the course had already become quite boring and very repetitive too. 

So I decided to leave. At the same time I left, I discovered a site called 9GAG. And it has nothing to do with English, it was just a memes site in English. And then, every day the first thing I did when I started using the computer, was to open 9gag and look and see all the memes and read the comments of all the memes. And I did this every day. And the second thing I did, I started as a teenager when I was 12 14 years old. I really liked video games and computer games and I found on the Gamer(s) channel, people who made videos playing just by speaking English making comments in English. I really liked the video itself so for me it wasn’t very important to understand everything that the person was saying, so I watched the video anyway. So every day I saw memes, I watched videos of people playing and the combination of those two things and the habit of doing that all the time… At some point I started to realize that I could understand English. I also thought a lot in English, I talked a lot to myself in English. And whenever I had a computer problem, or whenever I had any questions, I would Google in English. And I always read forums and stuff in English as well.

So, I basically learned English from the internet. And then, at some point, I could communicate. I realized that I could also talk to people in English, I could also understand what people were talking to me and I had never done any conversation practice. Simply after years of doing this, I started to be able to communicate with people. 

Well, that was the first language I learned. And the second language that I tried to learn, if I am not mistaken, was Russian. And what I did to learn Russian, in fact, was totally contrary to what I did to make/learn English. I started studying grammar, I found websites about the language, I learned the basics, I learned how to say “hi”, how to say “all right”, and then I would try to memorise pronouns, verbs, grammar rules and things like that and it didn’t work out. And then I started to think that I needed some way to repeat what I had done with English and that’s when I found if I’m not mistaken an app and the app had Italian classes. 

I thought “well, why not learn an easier language first?” And then I took it and started studying Italian with the app. And then I thought: “but, I need to repeat what I did with English”. And then, I started watching videos on YouTube of an Italian he made… he commented on movies… he did movie reviews… or movies reviews*. I combined those two things and started studying Italian. And then I found podcasts in Italian with transcriptions, I started to listen and read this too. And then I also found an app where I could meet people and talk to them. And then, I also started… after a few months of learning enough to understand and be able to produce my own sentences, I started to talk in Italian with some people too. 

* Two different words in Portuguese, but mean the same in English. The meaning doesn’t change much either in this case.

And the interesting thing is, I felt that I had really started to learn, and when I started talking to these people I was surprised that yes, I was able to talk to them. Because I didn’t know, I wasn’t sure if it would work or not, but people not only understood me but also praised my Italian. And it wasn’t hard for me to speak Italian either. It was natural, because I had heard it several times before. 

And it was at that time that I started to research much more about it. Then I found other polyglots who did the same thing, and since then I’ve been using this combination of methods of you listening a lot, you talking to people, you using apps, and you using transcription podcasts. So the combination of these things is what I use to learn languages until today. And I believe that anyone can learn a language that way. 

Thanks.