Trading coins also requires a bit of English—otherwise you won’t be able to remember any coin name. It’s embarrassing when you mispronounce a coin name while chatting with others 😮💨
During the Cold War, diplomats really had a method for learning languages, and it’s actually pretty effective—better than Shang Wenjie’s approach.
Why are diplomats able to master multiple languages so fluently, and why do they pick up new languages so fast? Because their way of learning foreign languages is very direct: they don’t focus on grammar, they don’t memorize vocabulary. They just do one thing—drill the translation step in the middle until it’s automatic. This method is called pattern drill. Its source traces back to a WWII fast-track language program for the U.S. military in 1942.
Later, the Defense Language Institute in the U.S. used the same approach to train 65 languages.
If you’ve been learning English for 10 years but still can’t speak, it’s not that your vocabulary isn’t enough. It’s that your brain has an extra processing step.
The U.S. State Department once published a chart showing that Spanish and French, from zero to being able to work, can be achieved in about 600 to 750 hours.
For Chinese and Japanese, it’s around 2200 hours—calculated from training data used by the U.S. Foreign Service Institute over more than 70 years.
And English is the simplest language in that list.
Fluency isn’t knowledge—it’s automation. Many people hear English, translate it into Chinese, think of the answer, translate it back into English, and then say it.
By the time others finish speaking, you’re still stuck on the second step.
The simplest version is called substitution practice: keep the sentence pattern the same, only swap one word, and you must answer within 3 seconds.
“I want coffee, I want tea, I want milk”—repeat it dozens of times, and the sentence structure turns into reflex. You open your mouth and it comes out automatically. It’s just like learning to drive: at first you think through every step, but after a few years your hands and feet move on their own.
In the past, you needed a native-speaker teacher sitting across from you, constantly throwing sentences at you. Now AI can serve as that teacher. I’ve turned the whole process into a diagram—you just follow it and practice. Do it for the time you set, and it will definitely work.
During the Cold War, diplomats really had a method for learning languages, and it’s actually pretty effective—better than Shang Wenjie’s approach.
Why are diplomats able to master multiple languages so fluently, and why do they pick up new languages so fast? Because their way of learning foreign languages is very direct: they don’t focus on grammar, they don’t memorize vocabulary. They just do one thing—drill the translation step in the middle until it’s automatic. This method is called pattern drill. Its source traces back to a WWII fast-track language program for the U.S. military in 1942.
Later, the Defense Language Institute in the U.S. used the same approach to train 65 languages.
If you’ve been learning English for 10 years but still can’t speak, it’s not that your vocabulary isn’t enough. It’s that your brain has an extra processing step.
The U.S. State Department once published a chart showing that Spanish and French, from zero to being able to work, can be achieved in about 600 to 750 hours.
For Chinese and Japanese, it’s around 2200 hours—calculated from training data used by the U.S. Foreign Service Institute over more than 70 years.
And English is the simplest language in that list.
Fluency isn’t knowledge—it’s automation. Many people hear English, translate it into Chinese, think of the answer, translate it back into English, and then say it.
By the time others finish speaking, you’re still stuck on the second step.
The simplest version is called substitution practice: keep the sentence pattern the same, only swap one word, and you must answer within 3 seconds.
“I want coffee, I want tea, I want milk”—repeat it dozens of times, and the sentence structure turns into reflex. You open your mouth and it comes out automatically. It’s just like learning to drive: at first you think through every step, but after a few years your hands and feet move on their own.
In the past, you needed a native-speaker teacher sitting across from you, constantly throwing sentences at you. Now AI can serve as that teacher. I’ve turned the whole process into a diagram—you just follow it and practice. Do it for the time you set, and it will definitely work.
