Let's have a LANGUAGE CHALLENGE for you and me ! Hey, my buddies. My language goal is fluency in English in 3 months (until October 13th, 2015), like Benny Lewis said, instead of just saying that you

Loong Loong

Let's have a LANGUAGE CHALLENGE for you and me !

Hey, my buddies. My language goal is fluency in English in 3 months (until October 13th, 2015), like Benny Lewis said, instead of just saying that you want to be fluent "SOME DAY", I should set a date for my goal publicly. But I will concentrate on daily or weekly goal to make sure I will improve my English on a daily basis.

I believe my English level is pre-intermediate. It will be easy for me to achieve my goal in 3 months haha than starting from a beginner. I used to attend Korean classes in 2 years, 2 days a week and 5 students in that class. One day, my teacher told us I was the only student who never missed any classes in 2 years. I will always try my best to not skip any classes because I will feel bad if I missed the class, even thought the teacher can summarize the notes for the previous lesson. But I am a perfectionist and I want to attend a full lesson. My point is I'm not trying to say how hard working I was, I will be good at learning if I am kept on the track and will end up where I want to be.

I'm going to have a mini goal for DAY-1, July 13th, 2015 - tomorrow

SPEAKING - 2 hours

LISTENING - 2 hours

READING - 2 hours

WRITING - 2 hours

I think I can do more than 8 hours since I'm a learning English in full time. But let me dip my toe in the water for my first day. Probably I will need to set a timetable if it doesn't work very well.

Please join with me so we can keep ourselves on the right track and encourage each other.

Jul 12, 2015 4:00 PM

251

Comments · 251

You are lucky to have eight hours per day to study English!

July 12, 2015

Benny Lewis does have this thing about setting seemingly unrealistic goals for himself in order to challenge and motivate himself to put in the work. But he also makes a big point about effective studying, and I've read him say something along the lines that in his view 30 minutes good study is better than an hour and a half inefficient study.

8 hours a day is an awful lot and I don't think it's especially realistic to maintain over a 3 month period. For me, if I were to study eight hours a day I think I would be burnt out and ready to throw in the towel after two weeks. Of course you may be different and be able to do it in which case I wish that I had your powers of concentration! Anyway, a good thing to do is to make it public as you have done. That will give you further incentive to keep up the work.

July 12, 2015

Lol at Benny Lewis. Incidentally he defines fluency as B2. When he attempted this for Mandarin he reached A2 in 3 months. My point is that you should take what people say with a grain of salt.

Regarding your schedule. Why did you leave off grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation? As with everything else, it's better not just to rely on the reinforcment from other skills to assimilate these, but to also study them directly. My second question is why use exactly the same amount of time for each skill? It takes much more time to achieve the same level in listening and vocabulary than the other skills, so if it were me I'd alot more time to them. The third issue is just a clarification - you meant "conversation" when you wrote "speaking", right?

July 13, 2015

Wow, this is really difficult. It is possible that you'll finish bored and tired.
Some specialists say that the best form for learning a language is doing a linguistic immersion. Nevertheless, the best form for improving the level is introducing the language in your daily life.
Perhaps it would be better to dedicate less hours or trying to do things more funny than typical classes, e.g. reading books, listen to the radio, watching TV programs or movies and practicing a lot of speaking.
What I think that really works in the method of this man (Benny Lewis) is what he says about the most important idea for learning a foreign language: speak since the first day. You need to learn a language like a child: first, listen; then, speak (this website is very useful for practicing speaking) and the next steps will be reading and writing.
And the most important: be curious; a timetable is a good tool, but you need to feel the learning method more comfortable, natural. Its not important if you commit some mistakes, with more practice, you will improve very fast.

Good luck!

July 12, 2015