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      CONTENTS

       COVER

       TITLE PAGE

       My Story, Your Passion

       Your story, like mine, begins and ends with passion – the surest path to learning a new language.

       Destroying Twenty Common Language-learning Myths

       Stop making excuses. There’s simply no reason you ‘can’t’ learn a new language, and I’ll tell you why.

       Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It

       Do away with vague daydreams, such as ‘learn Spanish’, by setting specific end goals within specific time frames and incorporating new language-learning techniques to achieve concrete results.

       CHAPTER 3

       How to Learn Thousands of Words Quickly

       If you don’t have the memory of a supercomputer, don’t worry. This chapter explains why we forget things and teaches a much more efficient – and fun – way to remember foreign words.

       CHAPTER 4

       Immersion Without Buying a Plane Ticket

       You don’t need to be in a foreign country to learn the language. You can do it from the comfort of your home or local community.

       CHAPTER 5

       Speaking from Day One

       Start speaking a new language right away with easy-to-follow ‘cheats’ for when you don’t know the words you want to say.

       CHAPTER 6

       Tips for Starting Specific Languages

       Learning a specific language is easier than you think. Here I tell you why.

       CHAPTER 7

       From Fluency to Mastery

       Strive towards fluency, and beyond, by coming back to the academic aspects better suited to this part of the language-learning process.

       CHAPTER 8

       How to Get Mistaken for a Native Speaker

       It’s time to go beyond fluency by adapting to the local culture, until a stranger mistakes you for a native!

       CHAPTER 9

       Hyperpolyglot: When One Is Just Not Enough

       Take language-learning to the next level. Speak multiple languages without mixing them up or forgetting the ones you’ve already mastered.

       CHAPTER 10

       Free and Cheap Language-learning 2.0

       Study a new language beyond spoken practice sessions with invaluable – and mostly free – resources.

       Conclusion

       ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

       ABOUT THE AUTHOR

       COPYRIGHT

       ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

       My Story, Your Passion

      Your story, like mine, begins and ends with passion – the surest path to learning a new language.

      In late July 2003, just a couple of weeks after my twenty-first birthday, I moved to Valencia, Spain. To help me adjust to life in a foreign country, I enrolled in a Spanish class.

      It was a small class, and it was taught entirely in Spanish, which was a bit of a problem for me because I only understood English. I had just graduated with a degree in electronic engineering, and I had barely passed the German and Irish* courses I took in high school and college. Languages were definitely not my thing.

      After several classes, I was getting absolutely nowhere. Each lesson ended with the other students wearing great big satisfied smiles on their faces. I knew they had figured out something about the language that they didn’t know before, while I still couldn’t understand a single thing. My ego was destroyed. I was, without a doubt, the worst student in the class, and as I walked home with my head hung low, I couldn’t help thinking, It’s not fair! Why were those guys blessed with the language-learning gene and I wasn’t? I’m never going to learn Spanish.

      After six months in Spain, I could barely muster up the courage to ask how much something cost or where the bathroom was. I really started to think I would never learn Spanish. I began to worry my experience immersed in a different country would be a total failure. I was convinced my destiny was to spend the rest of my life speaking only English.

      Fast-forward seven years. One night in Budapest, I ended up at a ‘couchsurfing’ party at a local bar with an international crowd. I confidently strolled in and said hello to everyone in Hungarian, one of the most notoriously difficult languages in the world. I started chatting

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