Joseph Conlon > Quotes

“Between one half and three quarters of your study time should be spent reviewing previous material, and the remaining time should be given to repeating the new material as many times as possible.”
― Joseph Conlon, Polyglot Life: Learn Any Language Quickly and Efficiently

“​You must constantly reflect on your learning and your lifestyle and reevaluate your choices, schedule, methods, techniques, and materials. You cannot mindlessly follow any path to success in language learning. You can learn from people who have met success, but ultimately you must discover your own path, your own techniques, and your own habits. If you want to be successful, you must develop self-awareness, discipline, and the ability to critique yourself and make adjustments.”
― Joseph Conlon, Polyglot Life: Learn Any Language Quickly and Efficiently

“You can make progress by studying 15 or 30 minutes each day, but beginners will quickly become discouraged by how slow the entire process moves at this rate. You should ideally strive to find at least 60 minutes to study each day.”
― Joseph Conlon, Polyglot Life: Learn Any Language Quickly and Efficiently

“You must come to terms with the fact that perfection quite literally does not exist and that you will always make mistakes. You must become comfortable with making mistakes and with laughing at yourself.”
― Joseph Conlon, Polyglot Life: Learn Any Language Quickly and Efficiently

“The myth that adults cannot learn languages stems from the usual context in which adults encounter languages: in a classroom, memorizing grammar rules and morphological tables. Yet in such a situation very few if any people can successfully learn a language to fluency.”
― Joseph Conlon, Polyglot Life: Learn Any Language Quickly and Efficiently

“We should not fail to begin to practice something out of fear of not being able to accomplish the last percent of progress.”
― Joseph Conlon, Polyglot Life: Learn Any Language Quickly and Efficiently

“Second, and more importantly, you must seamlessly integrate the languages themselves into your lifestyle.”
― Joseph Conlon, Polyglot Life: Learn Any Language Quickly and Efficiently

“but the most efficient path is always to practice the skills that you want to have. The worst investment of time is the study of grammar, i.e., it leads to the slowest progress in every skill. The best investments are reading and listening, both of which improve the other ability and also improve your potential ability to speak, all while giving you an intuitive (fluent) understanding of the advanced grammatical rules of the language.”
― Joseph Conlon, Polyglot Life: Learn Any Language Quickly and Efficiently

“​In short, it is my experience (and the experience of many other polyglots) that the brain will keep a language active if you are studying or using a related language, even if you have no exposure to the first language. Indeed, sometimes you can improve and consolidate your knowledge of the first language with no dedicated effort simply by studying a related language.”
― Joseph Conlon, Polyglot Life: Learn Any Language Quickly and Efficiently

“If fact, it is sugar and simple carbohydrates that make us fat and give us heart disease and diabetes.”
― Joseph Conlon, Polyglot Life: Learn Any Language Quickly and Efficiently

“Maximize the amount of exposure you get to the language. Remember, as discussed above, that language ability directly correlates with how many sentences the brain has had to process. Spend as much time as possible reading and listening to the target language, and refer to your native language only when necessary. At the beginning you will, of course, need your native language in order to make sense of the dialogue or text, but your goal should always be to maximize the number of sentences that you process.”
― Joseph Conlon, Polyglot Life: Learn Any Language Quickly and Efficiently