#4 Laser Precision: Master One Language, Speak Many with the compound interest
Focus your energy on one foreign language before mastering several ones
Relation Between Laser and Language
Consider your language learning process like the way a laser works. As you know, it is a device that emits highly focused, coherent, and amplified light into a concentrated beam.
Applied to a language, consider that the light is your focus, the material you use to improve your competencies, and the beam is the result of your daily learning. Moreover, the specificity of a laser is that it focuses on one single point at a time, in a coherent and amplified way.
Once again, your language learning should focus on one language first before expecting to master others. The level of granularity is exactly the same within the language you want to learn.
First, focus on the basics. You have to know them very well as they will always be the first minutes of a conversation with a stranger. It is exactly the same process as your level improves.
The Compound Interests
Studying a language for a long time will allow you to perceive the dynamics behind it, to be good enough at it to apply it to any new language you want to learn afterwards.
Indeed, people become good at something because they do the same thing repeatedly for a certain amount of time. At the beginning, you are in the position of a student; you know nothing.
The laser focus helps you to take things one after the other. As time passes, you become better and better, and you start understanding your approach to learning, what works for you. It is exactly in this moment that the compounds of your efforts arrive.
For a language, it is the moment when you make links between verbs, situations, and words without putting any more effort into it, just by simply having a conversation with someone.
The compound effect helps you to master another language really fast because you took time to master a first language with laser focus.
The magic in this is that it applies to languages as it applies to anything else. Learning a language and knowing how to learn it helps you to learn anything afterwards because you always put yourself in the shoes of a student.
That’s it for today.
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Quentin