Yes, it is quite possible to learn a language in 10 days.
This is the short of it because if you want to learn a language in 10 days, you probably don't want to "waste time" by reading a lot of text. :-D
Now comes the long of it.
You just need to put in a LOT of work. Don’t expect to be able to do anything, but study and use the language. Everything you need to do, like eat and sleep, should happen in the target language.
If you want to learn a language in 10 days, you HAVE to put in at least 10 hours of work every day.
And I mean WORK. Intentional, focused, active, and determined. Now, a human being cannot do this for longer than 10-15 minutes at a time, if even that, so when you notice your focus starting to wander, take a pause, stretch a bit, and get back to work.
Also, you shouldn’t expect to learn it well or to be very fluent. It takes generally about 500 hours to learn a language, and there are only 240 hours in 10 days, even if you could study 24/7 for 10 days.
What you should expect is to get to a 5 year old child's level of language. And that is knowing the language. Might not know it well, might not be able to have advanced discussions with people, might not be able to pass tests, but you will know the language and be able to express yourself in it.
Remember to sleep at least 8 hours every night, remember to drink a lot of water, and eat little but sensibly. No sweets and junk food.
See yourself as a race car - you wouldn't put in the tank any crap, and expect the car to function optimally, would you? Then you should treat your body as the tool and instrument it is, and give yourself the best circumstances.
And take a walk in fresh air every hour or so. At least once a day.
To do this, you need to collect the words that are important to you. So... how to do this?
Write a list of things you want to be able to say. (In any language)
Write a list of things you actually say most days.
Write down things you do most days - describe your day. "I get up, I brush my teeth, I feed the cats..."
If you are active on some social media, copy your latest posts and add them to the list.
List all the items in your home and what they are used for or what you do with or to them. Like "door, I open, close, and lock it. Wall. It's needed to keep up the ceiling and to hang things on. Floor. I walk on it and I put furniture on it. Ceiling. It's there to keep the rain away and to hang lamps on. Bookshelf. Book. DVDs. Television. Armchair. Wardrobe. Clothes. Shirt, skirt, dress, pants, underwear... Fridge. Tomatoes, milk, coffee, tea, cup, saucer, plates, spoon, fork... You get the idea. Yes, every damn thing in your home. (Don't you wish you were a minimalist now and only owned 100 items? :-D No, I'm just talking about myself. I am a maximalist, I like things, and I have the weirdest, oddest things in my home I don't know the names of even in Finnish. And then I have the most specialized things for arts and crafts and baking. I mean... "serrated knife" isn't something most people use every day.
You will need 3000 words, and to get that, you will need to generate some 12.000 words of text. It's about 25 pages.
Now, this isn't all that serious. It is OK to use any word frequency list to fill up your list. I would not ignore this step, though, because you need to learn a language YOU can USE. Most people use only 2,500-3,500 different words in their everyday speech.
Now, if you can't possibly gather a personal word list of 3000 words, it's OK to take just any word frequency list and fill up the list.
Take this list and separate the words. You can use this tool: Word Frequency Counter. It can handle 3000-word texts. I don't know its limits. Maybe it can handle 12.000 words as well.
Then you need to reduce the list to reasonable lexemes. The word frequency counter counts "know", "knowledge", "known" and "knew" as different words. I count those as variants of one word. You do as you think is wise.
Like I - me - my - mine - myself are one word. For me to be able to say I know the word "I", I have to be able to inflect it and know that the different inflected forms are just "I" looking different.
Or you translate all these sentences, express the idea you want to express, in the language you want to learn, and do the frequency list with that. This is a bit more difficult, I would use my mother tongue (or the language I use most often) to do the list and just ignore the "you shouldn't TRANSLATE!!!". Come on! You are always translating, whether it is ideas, images, words, or thoughts. Most people don't think in full sentences of any language, but they most certainly have to express themselves in somewhat full sentences to be understood.
It is important to get the pronunciation right! Most words are pronounced as they are written BUT IN THE LANGUAGE. The French words are pronounced as they are written IN FRENCH. So even if you are just reading quietly in your mind, you should mind your pronunciation. Even if you never plan to speak the language with anyone. Learn the correct pronunciation when you learn a word. Take "horse", "hoarse" and "whores". There is a subtle difference there in the pronunciation. Most Finns cannot hear nor produce the difference. Or "they're, their, there".
To get it right, listen to Idahosa Ness. There are plenty of videos online where he presents his method. LISTEN to what he says and LISTEN to yourself when you place your tongue in different places in your mouth. It might take some time to learn to intentionally and consciously use your mouth, but it is invaluable when learning languages! And I am a language learner who studies languages to be able to READ.
Learn the 3000 most frequently used words of your language by heart. It shouldn’t take more than 2 days. Yes, this is totally mechanical, cramming your head, rote learning, parroting.
Just remember, you have to be able to pronounce the words understandably, know them when you hear them, understand them when you read them, and be able to write them.
You should learn the nouns in singular and plural, and know how to express the word in definite and indefinite form if your language has those. (And, frankly, you should be able to conjugate it in all cases, if your language has noun cases. Sorry, but they are pretty simple forms, and in reality, you just need to learn the exceptions, and the rest is logical, self-evident, and obvious - when you know the rule.
And you really should know the rule. I can promise you that when you have learned, let’s say “kissa, kissat, kissan, kissojen, kissan, kissat, kissaa, kissoja, kissana, kissoina, kissaksi, kissoiksi, kissassa, kissoissa, kissasta, kissoista, kissaan, kissoihin, kissalla, kissoilla, kissalta, kissoilta, kissalle, kissoille, kissoitta, kissoin, kissoineen”, “koira, koirat, koiran, koirien, koiran, koirat, koiraa, koiria, koirana, koirina, koiraksi, koiriksi, koirassa, omg will this crap never end”, you will very quickly learn the basic rule of cases in Finnish, and learn to see the case suffixes as postpositions.)
You should be able to know the comparative forms of every adjective
You should be able to conjugate the verbs in present AND simple past tense, in all persons. (that is; “I know, you know, he, she, it knows, we know, you know, they know - I knew, you knew, he, she, it knew, we knew, you knew, they knew”)
2 days.
Play with your new toys, and see how many sentences you can form with them.
If you don’t have a word for a sentence you want to make, find it out and learn it.
Write a diary with your new words. At least 10 sentences. It doesn’t need to be elaborated and advanced and fancy. “today I woke up at 9 a.m. It is rainy. I took a shower. I made myself a cup of coffee. I eat cereals with orange juice. I have a cat. Her name is Daisy. She is cute. I love her. It’s evening now. I watched the Aquaman. I don’t like it. I ate popcorn. Good night.”
Publish it on iTalki notebooks or Lang8 or CorrectMyText and get it corrected. (MyLanguageExchange might be helpful too, I don't know much about that.)
3 Fun Ways to Do Some Mighty Fine Foreign Language Writing
Then go and read it up aloud on Lingora and get your pronunciation evaluated.
Now, you can try a voice recognition program, for example, https://www.speechtexter.com/ but it might not be that good. Siri comes to mind :-D But - it CAN give you SOME guidance in what you need to be more careful with. Also, it needs Google Chrome.
Read. At least 10 pages of a fiction book written for people over 10 EVERY DAY.
And not just mechanically read. Understand what you read. And don’t use a translator. Use a dictionary. Yes, I do expect you to find out every damned word and translate it so that you understand what the text says. You don’t need to create a good translation of the text, though, just to understand it.
The more you read, the less you need your dictionary and the more of the language you learn.
You will develop a sense of the language and get the grammar in your spine, and you will use good language just because your language sense won’t let you use bad grammar. This is why you should keep reading at least 10 pages ever after if you want to improve your newly acquired language and actually get fluent in it one day.
Listen to the radio (in the language you want to learn, of course) from the moment you wake up to when you go to bed.
Find a song you like in the language with audio (for example a video on YouTube), learn the lyrics, and sing a long. Doesn’t matter that you can’t sing. No-one cares.
One song every day. At least one song.
It’s OK if it’s a translation or “language B version” of a popular song in another language. That’s just great because then you know the melody.
Watch at least 2 episodes of a TV series or 1 movie in the language, without subtitles (or subtitles in the language you are studying), every day. Basically, this is just a listening and understanding exercise, but if you want to improve your chances of learning the language, you can do more.
Google uses movies and television to learn a language.
-fluent in 3 months of movies
-joy of languages - learn a language by watching tv
-fluentU - learning languages through movies
-I will Teach You Any Language - is watching movies really a good way to learn languages? (no, but he gives good tips at the end of the article)
- Duolingo discussion about using television to help learn languages This is the short of it because if you want to learn a language in 10 days, you probably don't want to "waste time" by reading a lot of text. :-D
Day 1: you learn the alphabet PERFECT PRONUNCIATION LIKE A NATIVE, you learn the numbers - ALL OF THEM, WITH PERFECT PRONUNCIATION, you learn a handful of useful phrases.
You use them wherever you can.
Day 2: you learn the 1000 most frequent words, PERFECT PRONUNCIATION, ALL INFLICTIONS AND COMMON DERIVATES.
You use them as much as you can. Name everything around you. Talk to yourself. Try to create as many sentences as you can with the words you have.
Day 3: you learn the 2000 next common words, PERFECT PRONUNCIATION, ALL INFLICTIONS AND COMMON DERIVATES.
You use them as much as you can. Name everything around you. Talk to yourself. Try to create as many sentences as you can with the words you have.
Day 4-10: You will read, write, listen and speak the language. The more you do this, the better chances you have to actually succeed in learning the language. Verify your output and understanding.
To improve your chances to succeed, find someone (or preferably more than one) who is a native speaker of the language and talk with them.
Now comes the long of it.
You just need to put in a LOT of work. Don’t expect to be able to do anything, but study and use the language. Everything you need to do, like eat and sleep, should happen in the target language.
If you want to learn a language in 10 days, you HAVE to put in at least 10 hours of work every day.
And I mean WORK. Intentional, focused, active, and determined. Now, a human being cannot do this for longer than 10-15 minutes at a time, if even that, so when you notice your focus starting to wander, take a pause, stretch a bit, and get back to work.
Also, you shouldn’t expect to learn it well or to be very fluent. It takes generally about 500 hours to learn a language, and there are only 240 hours in 10 days, even if you could study 24/7 for 10 days.
What you should expect is to get to a 5 year old child's level of language. And that is knowing the language. Might not know it well, might not be able to have advanced discussions with people, might not be able to pass tests, but you will know the language and be able to express yourself in it.
Remember to sleep at least 8 hours every night, remember to drink a lot of water, and eat little but sensibly. No sweets and junk food.
See yourself as a race car - you wouldn't put in the tank any crap, and expect the car to function optimally, would you? Then you should treat your body as the tool and instrument it is, and give yourself the best circumstances.
And take a walk in fresh air every hour or so. At least once a day.
Day 0
You need to take this seriously. Which means that you need a word frequency list for YOU. You don't want to learn words and sentences that are important to someone else. You want to be able to say what YOU want to say.To do this, you need to collect the words that are important to you. So... how to do this?
Write a list of things you want to be able to say. (In any language)
Write a list of things you actually say most days.
Write down things you do most days - describe your day. "I get up, I brush my teeth, I feed the cats..."
If you are active on some social media, copy your latest posts and add them to the list.
List all the items in your home and what they are used for or what you do with or to them. Like "door, I open, close, and lock it. Wall. It's needed to keep up the ceiling and to hang things on. Floor. I walk on it and I put furniture on it. Ceiling. It's there to keep the rain away and to hang lamps on. Bookshelf. Book. DVDs. Television. Armchair. Wardrobe. Clothes. Shirt, skirt, dress, pants, underwear... Fridge. Tomatoes, milk, coffee, tea, cup, saucer, plates, spoon, fork... You get the idea. Yes, every damn thing in your home. (Don't you wish you were a minimalist now and only owned 100 items? :-D No, I'm just talking about myself. I am a maximalist, I like things, and I have the weirdest, oddest things in my home I don't know the names of even in Finnish. And then I have the most specialized things for arts and crafts and baking. I mean... "serrated knife" isn't something most people use every day.
You will need 3000 words, and to get that, you will need to generate some 12.000 words of text. It's about 25 pages.
Now, this isn't all that serious. It is OK to use any word frequency list to fill up your list. I would not ignore this step, though, because you need to learn a language YOU can USE. Most people use only 2,500-3,500 different words in their everyday speech.
Now, if you can't possibly gather a personal word list of 3000 words, it's OK to take just any word frequency list and fill up the list.
Take this list and separate the words. You can use this tool: Word Frequency Counter. It can handle 3000-word texts. I don't know its limits. Maybe it can handle 12.000 words as well.
Then you need to reduce the list to reasonable lexemes. The word frequency counter counts "know", "knowledge", "known" and "knew" as different words. I count those as variants of one word. You do as you think is wise.
Like I - me - my - mine - myself are one word. For me to be able to say I know the word "I", I have to be able to inflect it and know that the different inflected forms are just "I" looking different.
Or you translate all these sentences, express the idea you want to express, in the language you want to learn, and do the frequency list with that. This is a bit more difficult, I would use my mother tongue (or the language I use most often) to do the list and just ignore the "you shouldn't TRANSLATE!!!". Come on! You are always translating, whether it is ideas, images, words, or thoughts. Most people don't think in full sentences of any language, but they most certainly have to express themselves in somewhat full sentences to be understood.
Day 1
- Learn the alphabet of the language. Do it the “old school” “A, B, C, D…” style. Record your pronunciation and polish it until there are no big differences. A written language has most of the phonemes of it in the alphabet. This shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.
- Learn the “Useful phrases” on Omniglot (or some other phrase list, if your language doesn't have Omniglot phrases). This, too, shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours, topmost.
- Learn the numbers, 0–100, and 1000, 10.000, 100.000 and 1.000.000
It is important to get the pronunciation right! Most words are pronounced as they are written BUT IN THE LANGUAGE. The French words are pronounced as they are written IN FRENCH. So even if you are just reading quietly in your mind, you should mind your pronunciation. Even if you never plan to speak the language with anyone. Learn the correct pronunciation when you learn a word. Take "horse", "hoarse" and "whores". There is a subtle difference there in the pronunciation. Most Finns cannot hear nor produce the difference. Or "they're, their, there".
To get it right, listen to Idahosa Ness. There are plenty of videos online where he presents his method. LISTEN to what he says and LISTEN to yourself when you place your tongue in different places in your mouth. It might take some time to learn to intentionally and consciously use your mouth, but it is invaluable when learning languages! And I am a language learner who studies languages to be able to READ.
Days 2–3.
Learn the 3000 most frequently used words of your language by heart. It shouldn’t take more than 2 days. Yes, this is totally mechanical, cramming your head, rote learning, parroting.
Just remember, you have to be able to pronounce the words understandably, know them when you hear them, understand them when you read them, and be able to write them.
You should learn the nouns in singular and plural, and know how to express the word in definite and indefinite form if your language has those. (And, frankly, you should be able to conjugate it in all cases, if your language has noun cases. Sorry, but they are pretty simple forms, and in reality, you just need to learn the exceptions, and the rest is logical, self-evident, and obvious - when you know the rule.
And you really should know the rule. I can promise you that when you have learned, let’s say “kissa, kissat, kissan, kissojen, kissan, kissat, kissaa, kissoja, kissana, kissoina, kissaksi, kissoiksi, kissassa, kissoissa, kissasta, kissoista, kissaan, kissoihin, kissalla, kissoilla, kissalta, kissoilta, kissalle, kissoille, kissoitta, kissoin, kissoineen”, “koira, koirat, koiran, koirien, koiran, koirat, koiraa, koiria, koirana, koirina, koiraksi, koiriksi, koirassa, omg will this crap never end”, you will very quickly learn the basic rule of cases in Finnish, and learn to see the case suffixes as postpositions.)
You should be able to know the comparative forms of every adjective
You should be able to conjugate the verbs in present AND simple past tense, in all persons. (that is; “I know, you know, he, she, it knows, we know, you know, they know - I knew, you knew, he, she, it knew, we knew, you knew, they knew”)
2 days.
Days 4–10
Play with your new toys, and see how many sentences you can form with them.
If you don’t have a word for a sentence you want to make, find it out and learn it.
Write a diary with your new words. At least 10 sentences. It doesn’t need to be elaborated and advanced and fancy. “today I woke up at 9 a.m. It is rainy. I took a shower. I made myself a cup of coffee. I eat cereals with orange juice. I have a cat. Her name is Daisy. She is cute. I love her. It’s evening now. I watched the Aquaman. I don’t like it. I ate popcorn. Good night.”
Publish it on iTalki notebooks or Lang8 or CorrectMyText and get it corrected. (MyLanguageExchange might be helpful too, I don't know much about that.)
3 Fun Ways to Do Some Mighty Fine Foreign Language Writing
Then go and read it up aloud on Lingora and get your pronunciation evaluated.
Now, you can try a voice recognition program, for example, https://www.speechtexter.com/ but it might not be that good. Siri comes to mind :-D But - it CAN give you SOME guidance in what you need to be more careful with. Also, it needs Google Chrome.
Read. At least 10 pages of a fiction book written for people over 10 EVERY DAY.
And not just mechanically read. Understand what you read. And don’t use a translator. Use a dictionary. Yes, I do expect you to find out every damned word and translate it so that you understand what the text says. You don’t need to create a good translation of the text, though, just to understand it.
The more you read, the less you need your dictionary and the more of the language you learn.
You will develop a sense of the language and get the grammar in your spine, and you will use good language just because your language sense won’t let you use bad grammar. This is why you should keep reading at least 10 pages ever after if you want to improve your newly acquired language and actually get fluent in it one day.
Listen to the radio (in the language you want to learn, of course) from the moment you wake up to when you go to bed.
Find a song you like in the language with audio (for example a video on YouTube), learn the lyrics, and sing a long. Doesn’t matter that you can’t sing. No-one cares.
One song every day. At least one song.
It’s OK if it’s a translation or “language B version” of a popular song in another language. That’s just great because then you know the melody.
Watch at least 2 episodes of a TV series or 1 movie in the language, without subtitles (or subtitles in the language you are studying), every day. Basically, this is just a listening and understanding exercise, but if you want to improve your chances of learning the language, you can do more.
Google uses movies and television to learn a language.
-fluent in 3 months of movies
-joy of languages - learn a language by watching tv
-fluentU - learning languages through movies
-I will Teach You Any Language - is watching movies really a good way to learn languages? (no, but he gives good tips at the end of the article)
- can you learn a new language by watching movies?
- mosalingua: how to learn a language with movies and series
- how films can help you teach a language
- the television trick to learn new languages
Talk with imaginary friends. Or enemies. Pretend to live in the world of your favorite book or TV show. Or videogame or whatever rocks your boat. If that doesn’t rock your boat, train for future situations you plan using your language in.
Describe everything you do, all the time. Preferably out loud, but quietly in your head, if you don’t want people to stare at you like you were an idiot. ("Now I’m brushing my teeth, now I’m making myself a cup of tea… I take the mug out of the cupboard, I fill the kettle with water, I put the teabag in the mug, I wait for the water to boil… here I am at the corner shop, I see oranges, I see bananas, I see I don’t know what that is, and I’m sure I don’t want to know, now I’m taking some tomatoes, one tomato, two tomatoes, three tomatoes…")
Write Post-its as a memory aid and put them all over your home.
Write your shopping lists in the target language. Name all the things you see in the shop. Think about the discussion at the counter. Ask the cashier if they speak your language and if they do, ask them to serve you in that language.
Record yourself speaking and post it on YouTube. If you put a challenging title to it, like “I bet you can’t find anything to correct in my —-ish!”, I’m pretty sure at least someone will come and tell you what you are doing wrong :-D “Please, help me learn and correct my —-sh” will probably not work well.
You can just do the ordinary “add1” or some other challenge thing, these usually have prompts about what you can say, or just copy people. (Except that if you are a Russian guy, don’t say “I’m a middle-aged Finnish woman”. Or you could, of course, say that. As said, whatever rocks your boat.) You could repeat those phrases you learned on day 1, and the words you learned on days 2 and 3, numbers, your word play, or whatever. Or you could record those imaginary conversations. Or play the conversations from the book you just read or the TV series.
Now, if you aren’t really introverted and shy and all that, you have an even better chance to learn a language. Get yourself at least one tutor on Skype or something like that, and live chat with them for at least one hour every day. Preferably get more than just one person to do this with. The more you use the language, actively use the language, try to remember the words you have learned, and not just look them up in a dictionary, try to form sentences and express yourself, try to be understood and understand, the more you learn and the better you get. The invaluable benefit of this is that you have someone who is there specifically to correct your language and fix the errors and mistakes as they happen, so that you won’t go around days, perhaps even years, having learned wrong, someone who IS fluent in the language and who KNOWS how it is used.
It’s highly possible that someone, who lives where you live, speaks the language you are trying to learn. Find them and talk with them.
HelloTalk
iTalki
Speaky
Tandem
Learn a Language by Talking Online with These 5 Tools!
If you have a specific reason to learn the language, sit down and think up the specific words you need for that reason, specific sentences you might need to say or that would be good to say, and several possible responses. Find out how to say this, and learn it by heart.
Learn the specific vocabulary for the occasion. Replace some of the 3000 words (like words for banana, quarterback, and satellite) with words that will be more useful for you.
If you have access to some professionally created language courses, great! Use them. Divide the material with the time you have, for example, if there are 30 lessons in a course, and you have 10 days - 10 hours every day, you will need to go through and learn 3 lessons every day. Start and end the day with a lesson, and put the last in the middle of the day.
The following is not important for this challenge, but if you want to continue with the language, I recommend you start doing this on day 11.
People who study languages with the fluidity and "passing as a native speaker" aspect in mind have noticed, that you don't only need to SOUND like a native, you need to LOOK like a native as well. So find some material with a native speaker saying things in front of a camera and copy their facial expressions and movements, especially how their mouth moves, in front of a mirror - or camera - and train until you get it right. Look at documentaries and copy how people move, how they move their bodies when they speak, how they sit, how they interact, how they stand when they speak with other people, and copy that.
