had initially seemed like a disadvantage—not having physical access to MIT—became an advantage. I could approximate the education of an MIT student for a fraction of the cost, time, and constraints.
Exploring this possibility further, I even did a test class using the new approach. Instead of showing up to prescheduled lectures, I watched downloaded videos for the class at twice the normal speed. Instead of meticulously doing each assignment and waiting weeks to learn my results, I could test myself on the material one question at a time, quickly learning from my mistakes. Using these and other methods, I found I could scrape through a class in as little as a week’s time. Doing some quick calculations and adding some room for error, I decided it might be possible to tackle the remaining thirty-two classes in under a year.
Although it began as a personal quest, I started to see that there were bigger implications beyond my little project. Technology has made learning easier than ever, yet tuition costs are exploding. A four-year degree used to be an assurance of a decent job. Now it is barely a foot in the door. The best careers demand sophisticated skills that you’re unlikely to stumble upon by chance. Not just programmers but managers, entrepreneurs, designers, doctors, and nearly every other profession is rapidly accelerating the knowledge and skills required, and many are struggling to keep up. In the back of my mind, I was interested not only in computer science but in seeing if there might be a new way to master the skills needed in work and life.
As my attention drifted once more to the scene developing outside my window, I thought about how all this had started. I thought about how I wouldn’t be attempting my odd little experiment at all had it not been for a chance encounter with an intense, teetotaling Irishman on another continent almost three years earlier.
FLUENT IN THREE MONTHS?
“My problem isn’t with the French—just Parisians,” Benny Lewis vented to me in an Italian restaurant in the heart of Paris. Lewis was vegetarian, not always easy to accommodate in a country famous for steak tartare and foie gras. Eating a plate of penne arrabbiata, a favorite he had picked up while working in a youth hostel in Italy, Lewis spoke in fluent French, not minding much if any of the locals overheard his complaints. His discontent stemmed from a particularly dreary year working as a stagiaire in an engineering firm in Paris. He had found it hard to adjust to the notorious job demands and social life in France’s biggest city. Still, he thought, perhaps he shouldn’t be too critical. It was that experience, after all, that had led him to leave his life as an engineer and travel around the world learning languages.
I had been introduced to Lewis during a moment of personal frustration. I was living in France as part of a student exchange program. I had left home with high hopes of ending the year speaking effortless French, but things didn’t seem to be turning out that way. Most of my friends spoke to me in English, including the French ones, and it was starting to feel as though one year wouldn’t be enough.
I complained about this state of affairs to a friend from home; he told me about a guy he had heard of who traveled from country to country, challenging himself to learn a language in three months. “Bullshit,” I said, with more than a hint of envy. Here I had been struggling to chat with people after months of immersion, and this guy was challenging himself to do so after only three months. Despite my skepticism, I knew I needed to meet Lewis to see if he understood something about learning languages that I didn’t. An email and a train ride later, and Lewis and I were meeting face-to-face.
“Always have a challenge,” Lewis told me as he continued with his life advice, now guiding me on a postlunch tour of central Paris: Lewis’s earlier feelings about Paris were starting to soften, and as we walked from the Notre Dame to the Louvre, his mood turned nostalgic about his days in the city. His strong opinions and passions, I would later learn, not only fueled his desire to take on ambitious challenges but could also get him into trouble. He was once detained by Brazilian federal police after an immigration officer overheard him cursing her in Portuguese to friends outside when she had denied him a visa extension. The irony was that his visa had been denied because she didn’t believe his Portuguese could be so good from such a short stay, and she suspected him of secretly trying to immigrate to Brazil outside the terms of his tourist visa.
As we continued to walk, now on the grounds in front of the Eiffel Tower, Lewis explained his approach: Start speaking the very first day. Don’t be afraid to talk to strangers. Use a phrasebook to get started; save formal study for later. Use visual mnemonics to memorize vocabulary. What struck me were not the methods but the boldness with which he applied them. While I had timidly been trying to pick up some French, worrying about saying the wrong things and being embarrassed by my insufficient vocabulary, Lewis was fearless, diving straight into conversations and setting seemingly impossible challenges for himself.
That approach had served him well. He was already fluent in Spanish, Italian, Gaelic, French, Portuguese, Esperanto, and English and had recently reached a conversational level while staying in the Czech Republic for three months. But it was his newest challenge he was planning that intrigued me the most: fluency in German after just three months.
It wasn’t, strictly speaking, Lewis’s first time with German. He had taken German classes for five years in high school and had briefly visited Germany twice before. However, like many of the students who spent time learning a language in school, he still couldn’t speak it. He admitted with embarrassment, “I couldn’t even order breakfast in German if I wanted to.” Still, the unused knowledge built up from classes taken over a decade earlier would probably make his challenge easier than starting from scratch. To compensate for the reduced difficulty, Lewis decided to raise the stakes.
Normally, he challenged himself to reach the equivalent of a B2 level in a language after three months. The B2 level—the fourth out of six levels beginning A1, A2, B1, and so on—is described by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) as upper intermediate, allowing the speaker to “interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party.” However, for his German challenge, Lewis decided to go for the highest exam level offered: C2. This level represents a complete mastery of the language. To reach a C2 level, the learner must “understand with ease virtually everything heard or read” and “express themselves spontaneously, very fluently and precisely, differentiating finer shades of meaning even in the most complex situations.” The Goethe-Institut, which administers the exam, recommends at least 750 hours of instruction, not including extensive practice outside the classroom, to reach this benchmark.
A few months later, I heard back from Lewis about his project. He had missed his goal of passing the C2 exam by a hair. He had passed four of five criteria for his exam but had failed the listening comprehension section. “I spent too much time listening to the radio,” he chastised himself. “I should have done more active listening practice.” Fluency in three months of intensive practice had eluded him, although he had come surprisingly close. In the seven years after my first encounter with the Irish polyglot, he has gone on to attempt his three-month challenge in half a dozen more countries, adding to his linguistic repertoire some Arabic, Hungarian, Mandarin Chinese, Thai, American Sign Language, and even Klingon (the invented Star Trek language).
What I didn’t realize at the time but understand now was that Lewis’s accomplishments weren’t all that rare. In the space of linguistic feats alone, I have encountered hyperpolyglots who speak forty-plus languages, adventurer-anthropologists who can start speaking previously unknown languages after a few hours of exposure, and many other travelers, like Lewis, who hop from tourist visa to tourist visa, mastering new languages. I also saw that this phenomenon of aggressive self-education with incredible results wasn’t restricted to languages alone.
HOW ROGER CRAIG GAMED JEOPARDY!
“What is The Bridge on the River Kwai?” Roger Craig hastily scribbled the question
