 What's up guys, EvilD here. Today I want to speak about learning a language in 15 minutes a day. The other day I was at the post office standing in line and for those who aren't Australians, we basically have to go to the post office to do any government based paperwork. And when I was standing there in line, I saw a bunch of books like sitting there on the shelf for sale and they said like, learn French in 15 minutes a day, learn in Chinese in 15 minutes a day. And when I saw that I was like, oh come on. Because I'm a language learner, I know that's basically a load of crap. Can't learn a language in 15 minutes a day, there's a lot more required than just that. Well I had a look at these books and of course they were just completely useless. So I want to talk about what's actually involved in learning a language to a high level of fluency. And I'm going to use Esperanto as an example because that's a language I speak to a high level of fluency. It's arguably one of the easiest languages in the world to learn. So you will pick it up a lot faster than other languages. But to get to fluency just like any other language, it's going to take some hard work or at least a lot of engagement. So let's talk about my story. Then when we get to the end of the video, I'll tell you the secret for actually learning it. So my humble story all started on a website called learnu.net. Learnu is basically your standard language learning website. Gives you a lot of conversational staffs and recordings, a couple of videos here and there. It had a forums. That was the thing that I loved about the most, the forums and where people answered questions. It still exists but it's been kind of superseded by lots of other websites. But at the time I was spending about 30 minutes a day on this website and I was mainly doing that between gaming sessions and I was kind of treating it more like an intellectual exercise and kind of doing it for fun. Not really trying to take it anywhere in particular. So I kept doing that for about three months. So you can see already that's 30 minutes a day for three months. Now I was doing that and then I thought actually maybe I should try and contact someone who speaks this language. That seems like a smart idea. So I looked in the local town I was in. I was in a very small remote town and there was no one there that spoke Esperanto. But there were people in a town about 40 minutes away. So I reached out to them and I basically said, Hey, I see you guys have got a group. Can I come around? And of course they were very welcoming. But one of them actually responded saying, Hey, I'm actually going to be in your town tomorrow. Do you want to meet up at lunch? I'll be there for like 30 minutes because I'm passing through and I was like, Oh, okay. Like it was completely unexpected. I remember I went to the cafe. I met with her. She like blah blah blah blah away in Esperanto and I really didn't understand any of it. But I nodded a lot and that was like the first opportunity for me to hear fluent spoken Esperanto. After that, I continued my study for a few more weeks. Then I finally went to one of those meetups and I had been preparing myself for like really in-depth conversation. So I was trying to study everything. But when I got there, it was just standard everyday stuff. People complaining about work, people talking about the food, the weather. So stuff that was actually quite easy for me to pick up. This was about maybe three, maybe four months into my studies. So that was a real ego booster because I was able to pick up a lot of the everyday conversation. Anything beyond that was still way beyond me. Then I started hanging out in online chat rooms. Now back then, the chat rooms were pretty basic. It was all just text-based. Nowadays, you've got like Discord, which is filled with Esperanto groups. But back then, it was all text-based. But I learned a lot of Esperanto slang. And in fact, a lot of the slang I use to this day probably comes from those original groups. Because like someone would be talking, I'd ask them, what does that mean? And they'd explain it in Esperanto and I'd be like, and then they'd explain it in Russian or something. And I'd be like, and then I'd just kind of pick it up through context and slowly get it. But I also met my first, I guess, local Esperanto speaking friend through that group as well, Kaya. And we chatted a lot and then eventually we met up. Now, when we met up, because we had always been chatting in Esperanto, we started talking in Esperanto, even though we both natively spoke English. And that became kind of my mantra moving forward. If you spoke Esperanto, I was going to speak Esperanto with you. Even if you fell back into English or even if I wanted to fall back in English, I would struggle through in Esperanto because I did not want to let myself just become that person who's like, I understand what I hear but I can't respond. Now at that point, I actually moved to Sydney. I started taking part in basically weekend to meetups like pretty much every weekend. I would go and spend like half a day with Esperanto speakers at different locations. So I was getting like a variety of input and it was at that point, I was actually told that there was an Esperanto speaker coming from Germany and they wanted to go to a hiking trip because they came down like once a year. And I was like, oh, okay, great. I'll come along and I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I remember when I went for that trip, this is when the Esperanto started to really start to get beyond just that standard conversational stuff. They were sitting in the front of the car driving and chatting away. And I was listening intently for about 40 minutes because it was driving along. And I really didn't understand any of it, but I was catching glimpses here and there and kind of getting the idea of the conversation. And there was this one old guy who just loved Australian fauna and flora and he would not stop talking about all the different trees and the leaves and all that type of stuff. And that's where a lot of my understanding of just trees and fauna and flora actually comes from. Literally just that one meetup with that one guy. And I spent the whole day with him just talking about that. And it was just, that was comprehensible input because he was pointing at it. I knew what those trees were and he was just saying the words over and over and describing them in different ways. It was roughly around that time I was also getting into acting. And then an old lady from the Australian Esperanto Association said that a position had opened up regarding communication and maybe like that would be a good fit for me. And I thought, you know what, I've got the spare time. Why not? So I decided to take part in it, which resulted in me having to take part in Skype meetings, listening to business-based Esperanto about all sorts of different things and there was like meeting agendas and all this type of stuff. And that's when I learned all that vocab. I also had to start responding to emails and specifically to members who were always angry about something. So I learned pretty much every word that could express anger just from that few months of doing that role. I was also contacted by a journalist at that time. I think they were redirected to me. They wanted to do a story on Esperanto and they said, hey, it's gonna be a really short clip. You guys will just ask you some questions and we want one sequence where you guys walk for a supermarket and just like act like you're shopping type of thing. And I was like, oh, okay. And they're like, yeah, you just talk about a few fruits and veg. And I was like, oh, okay. Now, I hadn't really studied fruits and veg up into that point because it's not something that I actually need in my daily life. So I started smashing all the different fruits and veg vocab that I could find like everything to do with fruits, everything to do vegetables. And then I started going to meat and cereals and stuff because I was like, what happens if we go down the wrong aisle or something and they asked me something and I'm just going to stand there looking like a doofus. When we actually did the interview, they literally just got us to walk down the aisle and pick up something and go, yummy. And that was pretty much it. Like there was not much involved but it forced me to actually look into that area. After that, I got married with my wife and then we had our honeymoon in Europe. And this is where I started meeting native Esperanto speakers who spoke at a level a lot faster and a lot more fluent than the ones I'd met so far. This actually trained my ear also to various different accents because I went from Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Spain and a bunch of other locations. I also went to Poland later on in places but as I went through all these different locations, I had to hear different accents and I also learned a lot of vocab about the local region. So there was one guy who took us for a tour through Italy and basically gave us like a historical tour of the whole place and that meant I learned a lot of stuff about like middle age based Europe. Then I started getting into Esperanto literature. First I started with translations of books that I love like Harry Potter and The Hobbit. Then I started moving into Esperanto originals which opened up my vocab and gave me more of an expressive personality. And at the same time, I was starting to write articles for the local Esperanto groups. For example, I'd write an article about peak oil which meant that I had to learn these words about specific industry based stuff. Then I got into YouTubing which is what a lot of people know me for. I basically started making a video every single day for at least a year, maybe two years where I'd speak about some random topic which meant before videos, I'd have to look up words because I just would not know how to say that which then actually reinforced my ability to speak about anything. Now at this point, things started to really heat up because I founded a company with my co-founder Chuck Smith called Ami Kumul. It's an app to find language learners nearby. I'll link in the description if you're interested. Anyway, we kept working on this and then we had to start raising investments, finding money, selling products. And all of this meant that I had to start doing things like business plans, but it's a plan like I find investors. So invest into it. Then we had to talk about things like shares, like vesting shares, which is plenty. God, they actually all this new vocab came related to specifically businesses and then I had to give business pitches with an Esperanto to Korean investors and stuff like that. So all of this here combined basically built up a massive vocab pool related to business. But that's not the end of my story because every day when I go out and I hang out with my friends in Esperanto and we speak about something sometimes I'll bump into one random word which just does not come into my head at that time. And I'll be like, oh, what is that? And I'll pull out my phone, I'll look it up in the dictionary and I'll go, ah, that's it. And I'll add it to my Anki deck and then I'll pretty much know that word moving forward. Sometimes I don't even need to add it anymore. At the beginning of this video, I promised to tell you how you could learn a language to almost fluency without really thinking about it. Realistically, there's only one way. You need to enjoy the process. So whatever you enjoy doing in English, do that in your target language. If your target language is Esperanto and you enjoy reading, do it in Esperanto. If your target language is French and you enjoy mountain climbing, go find a French-speaking mountain climbing group and just go do it. You will be surprised at how much you actually pick up by just taking part in those groups. You're not going to understand everything at first. I totally didn't. I was just like the dumb person walking around just listening in and just absorbing information. But that's how you got to do it and start using the language as much as you can and as early as you can. You'll have bad pronunciation, etc. But it does not matter. Just start speaking the language. Now to prove like all this works, I'm actually in the process of now learning Mandarin Chinese and I'm starting to record my process of doing that as well. And this Wednesday, depending on when you see this film, I will actually have dropped my first Mandarin vlog and I'm going to start showing more and more of that process as I move through that language. So if you like this type of content, like the video, share it around, sub to the channel and I'll see you all in the next video.