A good learning system will almost guarantee success in whatever you’re learning. Some of it comes down to the method you use, but a lot of it depends on how well you form habits.

• Learner One: Became fluent in a few years.
• Learner Two: Barely learnt to string a sentence together in the same amount of time.

Both started out with the same goal:

➡️ “I want to be able to speak Spanish.”

Yet, if goals alone were the key to success, everyone who set out to learn a language would be fluent within a few years.

But they’re not.

Nobody starts learning a language thinking,

➡️ “I really don’t want to be able to speak Spanish.”
(Unless maybe you’re a school student being forced to learn a language!)

So, if everyone starts with the same goal, what makes one learner succeed while another struggles?

I hear this all the time:

💬 “I’m not good at learning languages.”

But the mere fact you’re able to speak at all means you’ve already succeeded in learning one language—your native language.

Some people shift the statement to,

💬 “I’m not good at learning foreign languages.”

Over the years, I’ve taught so many people who had failed to learn before. And then, with the right approach, they succeeded. I truly believe anyone can learn a foreign language.

It might take some people longer. Some might reach more accurate fluency than others. But anyone can do it. The difference lies in the learning system you use.

• The method is what I control (I wrote the courses).
• The learning schedule is in your hands—but I can guide you.

Here’s an example of a bad method.

If I told you that the Spanish word for “apple” is “manzana”, and then I said that the word for “window” is “ventana”. Next, I say that the word for “sky” is “cielo”, and the word for “shoe” is “zapato”. Now, I’ll tell you that the words for “dog”, “to jump” and “very” are “perro”, “saltar” and “muy”. Finally, I’ll tell you that the words for “mirror”, “badge”, “to sing”, “now” and “chalk” are “espejo”, “chapa”, “cantar”, “ahora” and “tiza”.

If we then spent the next hour really learning those twelve words, using lots of different techniques and learning styles to really make sure you memorised them, at the end of the lesson, you’d know these twelve words perfectly:

manzana — apple
ventana — window
cielo — sky
zapato — shoe
perro — dog
saltar — to jump
muy — very
espejo — mirror
chapa — badge
cantar — to sing
ahora — now
tiza — chalk

But what use are they? After learning those twelve words, can you actually say anything useful in Spanish?

Whilst the techniques used to memorise words are good, the choice of words or reasoning behind them are not. You know twelve Spanish words, but what use are they to you? When will you ever be able to use them? Eventually, you might learn some other words that could make these words useful, but you’ve spent an hour and not really got anywhere.

Now, let’s try a better approach.

I’ll tell you that the Spanish word for “good” is “bueno”, the Spanish word for “delicious” is “delicioso” and the Spanish word for “it is” is “es”.

So, if “good” is “bueno” and “it is” is “es”, how would you say, “It is good”?

es bueno — it is good

How would you say “it is delicious”?

es delicioso — it is delicious

What do you think this means?

es fantástico

Well, you know “es” means “it is”, so you can probably guess that it means “it is fantastic”. So, “fantástico” is “fantastic” in Spanish.

Let me give you one more word, “muy”, which means “very”. How would you say, “It is very good”?

es muy bueno — it is very good

In that lesson, you learnt these words:

es — it is
bueno — good
delicioso — delicious
fantástico — fantastic
muy — very

You only learnt five Spanish words, but with these words, you can make up short sentences. These words are also words that you can build up from; they’re not randomly selected. You could arrive in Spain tomorrow, go to a restaurant and say, “es delicioso” or “es muy bueno”.

People often focus on how much they’re learning—the quantity.

But what matters most is the quality of what you’re learning.

1️⃣ 12 random words = no sentences
2️⃣ 5 carefully chosen words = you can communicate

That’s why I spent years crafting the 3 Minute Languages method:

✅ What to teach
✅ How much to teach
✅ In which order to teach it

A good method gives you immediate rewards.

🎁 You notice improvement right away.
🎁 You stay excited and motivated.

If you have to spend hours of studying before you notice any improvement in yourself, it’s going to be a tough battle ahead. However, if you notice that you improve as soon as you begin, no matter how small the improvement, it will get you excited. Immediate rewards keep you excited and motivated, but at the same time, delayed rewards accumulate in the background. Those little wins encourage you to carry on.

So, that’s the method. As I said, I’m in control of that, and I’ve done all the hard work so that you can focus on learning the language by watching the videos and working through the practice sections. But the “learning system” is made up of a method and also a “learning schedule”, so what does that mean?

(aka How Often You Learn)

If I control the method, you control the schedule. And it makes a huge difference. I can offer suggestions and push you in the right direction, but ultimately, it’s up to you.

You can give two people the same method, but:

😊 One person sticks to an effective schedule and succeeds.
😔 The other uses an ineffective schedule and struggles—or quits.

Now, you might be thinking that a learning schedule is a strict timetable where you spend hours studying each day, every day. However, an effective learning schedule is actually quite the opposite of that.

An effective learning schedule is something that fits in with your lifestyle and something that becomes a habit rather than a chore. If you say to yourself that you’re going to spend an hour each day studying French, and you’ve never studied French before, it’s going to be hard for you to maintain enough enthusiasm to stay motivated and carry on with that schedule for more than a few days.

Now, it might be that you’re an incredibly studious person, and you have experience creating learning schedules, and you know that your lifestyle easily allows for an hour every day of solid learning, in which case, that would be suitable. However, most people, including me, wouldn’t be able to maintain that for long.

An effective schedule:

✅ Fits into your life
✅ Becomes a habit, not a chore

Start with the smallest habit you can.

If you’ve never studied French before, saying you’ll do an hour a day is tough. You might keep it up for a few days... but then life gets in the way. I’ve tried to make this easier for you by breaking down my courses into 3-minute chunks. So, my suggestion for everybody who is starting out with 3 Minute Languages is to start with a learning schedule of one 3-minute video every day.

👉 Start with one 3-minute video each day.
Once you’re comfortable, increase to two videos.
Then three... but only when you’re ready, and never before then.

The golden rules:
🎯 Stop before you feel bored.
🎯 Don’t overdo it! Less is more.

What you want to find is the sweet spot where you’re watching a manageable number of videos each day, but you’re also stopping before you get bored. Now, that might be one video per day, which is fine; everybody’s learning schedule is different, and if one video per day is enough for you, you’ve found your learning schedule.

Don’t overburden yourself; it’s far better to pick a learning schedule that is less that what you could potentially achieve than to pick a learning schedule that is more than what you can achieve. Less is most definitely more in this case! And don’t feel bad about it; feel good about it, because you’re going to achieve success more quickly than somebody who overburdens themself.

If you find your 3 Minute Languages learning schedule is comfortable at three 3-minute videos per day, in a year, you’ll have spent over 54 hours learning your chosen language, and you’ll be amazed how far you’ll have come in that time.

However, if somebody else overburdens themselves and tries to complete ten videos per day, they might be able to maintain it for a few weeks, maybe a month or two, but if it isn’t comfortable for them, the learning process will start to feel like a chore. In one month, they’ll have managed about 15 hours of learning, but because it feels like a chore, and they have to force themselves to sit down and watch the videos, a lot of the information won’t go in as easily. Then, they might start to dwindle down to eight videos a day, five videos a day, then they might skip a few days, watch one video here and there, and before they know it, months have gone by and they haven’t done any studying at all. That’s why the tortoise will always beat the hare in the end.

Consistency matters more than intensity.

For the first seventy days of your language-learning journey, you need to develop a strong microhabit. You can do this by sticking to short chunks. I recommend one video each day for seventy days. Seventy days is long enough to form a habit, as long as the habit doesn’t take up too much of your time. Each video in any of my 3 Minute Languages courses is just three minutes long, so it’s very easy to fit in even during the busiest of days.

After seventy days, if you feel comfortable with your new habit, you can add a daily video. So, now, you’ll be watching two videos each day, and you can do this for forty days.

70 days — 1 video each day
40 days — 2 videos each day

Now, I give this method to anybody who asks for advice on how much work to do when they start learning with my courses, but so many people ignore it. They feel like it isn’t enough, but honestly, it really is, because by using this method, you will stick with language learning in the long run. If you watch one video each day for 70 days, and then two videos each day for 40 days, you’ll have watched 150 videos in less than four months. That’s about seven and a half hours of study. This slow but very steady progress is ideal for long-term learning.

Once you’ve hit the fortieth day of watching two daily videos, you can add another video. This time, you’ll be watching three videos every day for thirty days. You might like to note how much learning is actually taking place in each jump:

70 days — 1 video each day = 3 hours 30 minutes
40 days — 2 videos each day = 4 hours
30 days — 3 videos each day = 4 hours 30 minutes

Now, it’s vitally important that you do not watch more than the allotted number of videos, even if you think you could easily watch more. You have to force yourself to stop once you’ve reached the recommended number. Every time you end a cycle, see how you feel. Do you still feel like you want to do more? If so, move onto the next cycle

22 days — 4 videos each day = 4 hours 24 minutes
18 days — 5 videos each day = 4 hours 30 minutes

This last cycle is asking you to watch five videos per day, which is about 15 minutes of learning per day. Once you get to day 18 of this cycle, as always, see how comfortable you feel. If you still feel like you could fit more learning in each day, then carry on to the next cycle. However, if, once you move onto six videos per day, you feel like you’re watching just the right amount, then go back to five videos per day. Five videos per day would be your learning sweet spot, and that should be your learning schedule.

You’ll notice that by the time you reach the end of the 5-video cycle, you’ll have watched almost 21 hours of videos, and this is all in 180 days, which is less than six months. If five videos per day is your sweet spot, then you can continue watching five every day now, and in the next 180 days, you’ll have watched another 45 hours of lessons.

You can continue moving onto the next cycle until you find your own sweet spot for your learning style. Here are the cycles below, going from one video per day up to forty videos per day (or two hours per day of learning!). This is way more than most people can fit into their days, so this number of videos is for the most studious people.

As you can see, this learning schedule above goes right up to 2 hours of study per day, and if you are comfortable with spending that much time studying, then that’s great. And, in fact, if you were to follow the learning schedule, you’ll see that you could get there in less than a year (360 days), and form it into a sustainable habit.

However, for most people, I would guess that the most comfortable learning schedule would be to watch between one and five videos per day. If you were to watch five videos per day, that’s a very good amount of learning, and a very sustainable habit to form.

But, you must go through the process of starting with the microhabit and gradually increasing it to find where your sweet spot lies, that is the amount of time you can comfortably spend studying without feeling like you want to stop. You want to have to force yourself to turn off the videos each day rather than get to the point where you’re bored.

So, start off by watching one video per day for seventy days in order to form the habit, and then increase to two videos per day for forty days, three videos per day for thirty days, and so on.

At each stage, check in with yourself:

❓ Are you still enjoying it?
❓ Could you do more?
❓ Or is this your sweet spot?

Now, there is a third part to all “learning systems”. We’ve looked at the method, which is what I’ve taken charge of. Then, we looked at the learning schedule, which is all about forming a comfortable habit that you can maintain. The third part is your own attitude towards yourself.

The only way you’ll carry on with a learning schedule is if you change the way you think about yourself in terms of what you’re learning. Don’t tell people, “I’m learning French” because then that is your identity. You don’t want to be seen as the person who is forever learning French; you want to be the person who speaks French.

I’d recommend that you don’t tell people you’re learning a language until you’ve been doing it for a few months in secret. Then, you can say, “I’ve been learning French for three months now, and I’ve got pretty good”. Now, you might be nervous about saying this because you may be worried that if you boast, they’ll ask you to say something or prove it. But, panic not, because you will be able to say something in French. Nobody is expecting you to be fluent in three months, but you will be able to say some things.

So, once you’ve learnt a handful of French, change what you tell people to, “I speak French”. You might think, “I don’t know enough to say that I speak yet”, but what is the threshold? I speak English, but I don’t use as many words or even know as many words as a university professor of the English language. I might not even know half the words that a poet knows, but that doesn’t mean I don’t speak English.

The average native English speaker knows between 20,000 words and 40,000 words in their own language — that’s a huge range. You wouldn’t say that the people who only know 20,000 words don’t speak English whereas the 40,000-worders are the only people who deserve to say they speak English.

Anyway, don’t think too deeply about it; just make sure that once you can say a few sentences in your chosen language, you change your identity. If you don’t, you’ll forever be a learner rather than a speaker and it’ll be easier for you to quit.

Once you say, “I speak French”, then that is who you are, and you’ll find it nearly impossible to quit, because that would mean changing your entire identity again.

Pro tennis players can clearly play tennis, but they continue to practise and learn new skills constantly. You would never dream of describing Serena Williams as somebody who is learning to play tennis, but even at the height of her career, she spent hours every day learning new techniques and honing her skills. So, you need to say, “I speak French” rather than “I’m learning French”.

Once you change the way you think about yourself, your actions will also follow, naturally. This happens to us all the time, in both positive and negative ways. If we describe ourselves as being “bad at names” or “terrible at maths” or even “always late”, we start to accept them as facts and as personality traits that we can never escape. Once we describe ourselves as something, we then start to feel internal pressure to maintain this image, lest we be seen as liars.

If you tell people you’re bad at remembering people’s names, your brain will stop bothering trying to remember them, so you will become the person you describe yourself as. However, if you tell people that you’re good at remembering names, that pressure to live up to the standard you’ve publicly set for yourself will force your brain to remember people’s names. You’ll also make conscious choices to ensure you don’t forget what somebody’s name is — you might write it down, or tell a story about that person to somebody else making sure to use their name several times throughout, and with time, your ability to remember names will improve. If you simply say, “I’m not good at remembering names”, you give yourself an excuse or a get-out clause, so you don’t even need to try to bother remembering somebody’s name since that’s just not who you are!

With languages, there are lots of hurdles to get over, but the biggest and most brutal hurdles are your own thoughts about yourself. If you tell yourself or other people that you’re bad at languages, you will be bad at languages, and your brain will make sure you’re bad at languages. If you tell yourself or other people that you’re trying to learn French, you will always be trying to learn French and you’ll never feel like a French speaker.

However, if you tell yourself and other people that you speak French, now you can begin to become a better French speaker. The pressure of describing yourself as a French speaker will force your brain to learn better and try harder. Just doing this one thing will make a gigantic difference to your language learning.

That was a lot of information to digest, but I’ll break it down into the core components.

If you want to succeed in your goal to speak a foreign language, you need to have a good learning system. A learning system is made up of three things:

➡️ a good method
➡️ a comfortable learning schedule
➡️ a change in identity from learner to speaker

You have the method with 3 Minute Languages, and I’ve shown you how to develop your own learning schedule. Once you’ve started lesson one of whichever 3 Minute Languages course you pick, you can confidently call yourself a speaker rather than just a learner.

Happy learning :-)

Kieran