Ultralearning. Scott H. Young
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 on his screen. Despite first fumbling over the legibility of the film title’s final word, Craig was correct. He had won $77,000—the highest single-day winnings in Jeopardy! history at the time. Craig’s victory wasn’t a fluke. He broke records again, amassing nearly two hundred thousand dollars, the highest ever five-game winning streak. Such a feat would be remarkable on its own, but what was more incredible was how he did it. Reflecting on the moment, Craig says, “My first thought wasn’t ‘Wow, I just won seventy-seven thousand dollars.’ It was ‘Whoa, my site really worked.’”
How do you study for a test that can ask any question? That was the essential problem Craig faced as he prepared to compete. Jeopardy! is famous for stumping home audiences with trivia questions that can ask about anything from Danish kings to Damocles. Thus the great champions of Jeopardy! tend to be brainy know-it-alls who have spent a lifetime amassing the huge library of factual knowledge needed to spit out answers on any topic. Studying for Jeopardy! might feel like an impossible task, as you would need to study almost every conceivable subject. Craig’s solution, however, was to rethink the process of acquiring knowledge itself. To do that, he built a website.
“Everybody that wants to succeed at a game is going to practice the game,” Craig contends. “You can practice haphazardly, or you can practice efficiently.” To amass the wide-ranging trivia needed to break records, he decided to be ruthlessly analytical about how he acquired knowledge. A computer scientist by trade, he decided to start off by downloading the tens of thousands of questions and answers from every Jeopardy! game ever aired. He tested himself on those during his free time for months, and then, as it became clear that he was going to go on television, he switched to aggressively quizzing himself on the questions full-time. He then applied text-mining software to categorize the questions into different topics, such as art history, fashion, and science. He used data visualization to map out his strengths and weaknesses. The text-mining software separated the different topics, which he visualized as different circles. The position of any given circle on his graph showed how good