How do you learn a language in 3 minutes?

Now, obviously you can't learn a language in just three minutes, but you can learn it in three-minute chunks.

When you learn something new, what tends to happen is that you start out with lots of enthusiasm and motivation. When you're full of motivation, you can easily sit learning for hours and hours on the first day or two. However, normally, this motivation dwindles very quickly and then most people give up.

With 3 Minute Languages, the method makes you stop learning after just a few minutes. By forcing yourself to stop whilst you're still enthusiastic, you will keep your motivation levels high and you will want to continue for longer.

Short bursts of studying every day are much more beneficial for language learning than long, drawn out lessons once or twice a week. You'll find that you will maintain your enthusiasm for learning meaning your daily 3-minute lessons will easily become a habit, and you'll remember everything much better.

In each 3 Minute Languages lesson, you'll learn a few words that you can put together to build sentences. As you progress through the lessons, you'll learn more and more words and be able to make longer and more complex sentences, and when we get to trickier grammatical structures, they are tackled in a simple step-by-step way.

I developed the 3 Minute Languages method over fifteen years, testing it and tweaking it with my own students to make sure it was as good as it could be. As well as the short lessons, another unique part of this method is the order you'll learn things in.

Traditional language courses start out by giving you a long list of pronunciation rules, starting with the letter 'a' and going through the whole alphabet. I know when I started to learn languages, this put me off immediately, because I was being bombarded with strange information before I had learnt a single word of the language. In the 3 Minute Languages courses, we get used to the pronunciation rules gradually with each word we learn.

Additionally, the words and phrases you learn at the start of traditional language courses are not always very useful. I remember learning how to say things like:

- I have a sister who is twelve years old

- I have two dogs and a cat

- My favourite sport is tennis

These sentences weren't very useful when I first went abroad, so I didn't really get the opportunity to speak. What I did for the 3 Minute Languages courses is change what you learn first. I chose the most useful words and I give them to you in the very first lesson, so that you'll be able to say things that you'll actually use the first time you travel abroad.

So, that's how the 3 Minute Languages courses work. You can start out knowing nothing, and you'll be speaking from the very first lesson.

You can learn with 3 Minute Languages in many ways. We have books, ebooks, audiobooks and online courses. Whichever method you prefer, there's something for you.

Happy learning

Kieran