Nowadays, learning languages is very important in order to succeed personal and professionally.

It does not matter if you were bad at languages at school, because everybody is able to learn a new language if they do it the right way and put effort into it.

If you really want to speak, read and write any language fluently, there are two things that you will really need:

- Willingness to work: You have to want to learn the language, not just wish it, because you will have to study on your own for some months and everything will depend on you. For example, a speaker of a romance language (French, Italian, Spanish,etc.) can learn another romance language in less than 200 hours. However, he has to work during these hours, because if he is not persistent, he will probably stop after 30 hours, then go back, then stop again and never finish.

- An intelligent method: Many people study a language for years and cannot order a pizza in this language. If you think I exaggerate, ask someone who studied a language at school. So, the second most important thing is to work intelligently, so you don’t waste your time and your energy.

Before starting your learning adventure, I would like to introduce you the story of a person, who, from my point of view, is a genius. I think every person passionate about languages should take him as a reference:

Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti (1774-1849) was an Italian Cardinal and famed linguist. Mezzofanti was well known for being a hyperpoliglot who fluently spoke 38 languages. He never left Italy; however, he managed to learn how to speak every language without an accent. People from all over the world went to Italy to challenge him in their native languages. They all reported their amazement at this man’s fluency. The study of Mezzofanti is a 500 pages book by Charles William Russell published in 1863.

Here I attach a list of the languages he could speak fluently. Although, he could understand, read and write a lot more languages and dialects.

I hope you feel encouraged after this story, so you can start now with your language learning adventure. This blog will help you through the whole learning process, providing you with tips, different methods, tools, etc.

See you next week!