At 21 years old, Andrew Pham was a young Vietnamese student living in Paris. Even though he did not call himself a polyglot, he already spoke five languages at the time: French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and his native Vietnamese.
While it had been rather easy for him to learn, he observed that it still took him several months to a year to learn any of the new languages. With this observation in mind, he progressively structured and improved his learning process until it finally yielded top results, helping reduce the time it took him to learn Italian to three and a half weeks, just in time for his trip to Rome. After this, he went on to study Chinese Mandarin using the same approach, this time taking him only four weeks to be able to speak in Chinese with others.
Beyond sharing his method of learning any new language in less than a month, Andrew Pham also shares with us what we should do in order not to forget or to quickly recover any language we might be losing or might have lost. To this effect, he shows us tangibly what he did to recover Portuguese about two weeks prior to a planned trip to the Rio Olympics Games.
Fast forward to the present time, he currently speaks nine languages among a dozen he knows--but the difference is that, now, it only takes him about 1 month, rather than several months or years, to learn each new language.
In a no nonsense but humoristic style, Andrew Pham tells us not only how he successfully learned all these languages, but also what he learned, when and why. In relaying his story, he reminds us why learning to speak, read, and write in the new language at the same time might not be the right thing to do and why his choice is to learn to speak first. Conveying tangible examples of grammar and verb summaries he had developed for himself, he also demonstrates how to quickly build up a new vocabulary even when the language you are learning is not of the same family as the language or languages you have already learned. To make this as tangible as possible, he again provides us with concrete examples of techniques and vocabulary buildup for languages as diverse as Russian, Arabic, Swahili, Chinese, and even Japanese.
So, if you are looking to learn how to speak a new language in one month and never forget it or else recover it quickly, you have come to the right place.
