Learn Italian in 30 days, secret technique 🇮🇹

Hello friends and welcome back. If you're interested in learning Italian or any other language, this video is for you. The first time I had this idea of learning Italian was a couple of years ago. I thought that Italian sounded nice, it had a lot of culture attached to it and the literature is very rich. And I had a couple of friends that spoke Italian at the hospital, so I thought it is a good idea maybe I can speak with them and practice. And learning a new language is always beneficial. And of course, like everybody else, the first thing to do is download this application called Duolingo. Unfortunately, after a couple of weeks, even a month of dedication using this application, I was going nowhere. And the usual pattern here is to drop everything and quit. But I didn't want to do that. So I made some research, read some articles and even watched some YouTube videos and came up with my own study plan, totally for free and without the help of anyone. And since I was planning a trip to Italy in a couple of months, I had a target. I wanted to be able to do a basic conversation, to be able to communicate with the people in the streets using only the basics. And I only had two months. So here's my study plan. I will break it up into four stages. So in the first stage, I concentrated mainly on the vocab. I downloaded the list of the 1000 most common used words in Italy. You can find this list online for free. I memorized these words. It took me like 7 to 10 days. And I used an application to help me do so. And it's called Anki. So this first stage is inspired by a YouTuber named Nathaniel Drew and it consists on this principle called the Pareto principle, also known as the 80-20 rule. This concept is really amazing. You can use it in any other field, not only in language learning. And the main idea here that we can apply now is that in our day-to-day conversations, 80% of these conversations only use 20% of the whole vocab of a certain language. So in Italian, it means we're using around 1000 to 2000 words. So if I'm able to memorize 1000 words, somehow I'm covering all the vocab I need to lead a basic conversation. Because unless I'm going into a very specific field, I'm not going to use some specific terms, some technical terms. I only need the basics. And this is really amazing. Imagine in only 7 to 10 days, I was able to memorize all the vocab I need to lead a simple conversation. Now to pass to the stage number 2, which in fact is not chronologically directly after the stage number 1. The stage number 1 and stage number 2, they overlap somehow in the last few days. And this stage consists of knowing the basic structures and sentences. So my strategy here is very easy. I simply googled and searched on YouTube for some basic lessons about grammar and sentence structures. I studied the pattern of the phrases and I tried my own. This is very important. You should always try to come up with the sentences on your own. I used to write daily 10 sentences and correct them. And while doing this, it was very obvious that I needed some conjugation lessons. I didn't go deep into this matter. And in a day or two, I learned the minimum that I needed. I learned only 3 tenses. The present, the future and the past. That's it. So till now, I have spent around 3 weeks, let's say, learning some vocab, learning some grammar, practicing the grammar and the conjugation. Now we pass to the stage number 3, because I'm still missing a big part. The comprehension and the pronunciation. And to work on that, I was listening every day to podcasts. Language learning podcasts. And I was watching every day short YouTube videos in Italian. Ciao a tutti e bentornati oppure benvenuti sul mio canale. At first, it was so discouraging. I'm not gonna lie. Because my brain is still not programmed to this new language. And something was happening that's really frustrating. I couldn't tell where one word ends and the next word starts. For me, it was like a continuous sound, all together. Voi che vedete tante persone in paese. But trust me, one day you will magically understand the whole thing. One day, I think it was on my fourth week mark, all of a sudden I was watching a YouTube video in Italian and I could understand the majority of it. And I was kind of surprised, because few days ago I was struggling to understand the sentences. But now this video made sense to me. At first, your aim is only to get the gist of the video you're watching. You don't really have to understand every single word. Only the context of the dialogue. And then you will make some progress from there. Don't worry. Accendiamo la radio e lo aspettiamo. Uomo temendolo. Tone estivo. Cos'è il tormentone? And now for the stage number four, I used something called the immersion effect. Here, you literally immerse your brain in the task you are trying to learn. You keep exposing your brain constantly to the thing you are trying to acquire. So I started to read articles in Italian, short texts in Italian, even YouTube videos in Italian. I even tried to switch my phone to the Italian language. And I started to read the news in Italy. Why not? You get the idea. And now for the results. After a couple of months, I was comfortable to read a text in Italian. I was comfortable to lead basic conversations. Even I watched some short YouTube videos in Italian. And I was very happy with the progress. And now for the big question, did I use my Italian during my trip? And yes, of course I did. I was so happy I did. And the people there really appreciated and liked the effort. And on some occasions, it was very useful because not every time people spoke English. And this trip really encouraged me to continue my learning journey. And since then, I didn't stop learning Italian. I still have a lot to learn, but I'm really happy with the progress so far. Finally, I have three tips for anyone starting his or her journey right now. One, encourage making mistakes. Don't avoid them. The thing that really helped me learn a lot is committing the mistakes. Number two, don't be shy, especially with native speakers. They will love it if you try to learn their language. Number three, be consistent and believe in the daily little steps, even if you memorized just one word per day. And thank you so much. That's it for this video. If you're interested in the resources I have used to learn this language, let me know in the comments. Maybe I can make a new video about this. Don't forget to subscribe if you want to stay tuned. See you next time.