Benny Lewis's Reading List

"I’m a big fan of the Teach Yourself series. I have been for a very, very long time, and they ultimately brought me on to teach my own courses with them. So I’m good friends with that publisher now. But long before they ever got in touch with me, I liked that they had a traditional course—what people think of when they’re looking for a language course—something that has exercises, that teaches you some grammar, that has vocabulary lists. I like the process that they use more than other courses, because they don’t try to overload you with grammar, and they try to give you some example conversations. It’s a good balance. I definitely like how Teach Yourself does it. It’s like anything. If you want to improve your skills, you need to be as dedicated as possible. One thing I would recommend—especially with languages, because languages require you to change how you think in certain ways—is rather than putting in 30 minutes a day, for a year, I would suggest that, for the next three months, you make a few sacrifices. Don’t watch your favourite shows on Netflix, take one less day out of the week to go out with your mates to the pub, and make these sacrifices—not for the rest of your life, but for a short period. Then for those months you put in a few hours a day, if you can. Say you were going to put 1,000 hours towards learning Spanish. You could spread that out over five years. I’m sure many people would relate to that from doing it in school. I studied German in school, spread those hours out, and in the end I didn’t really have that much to show for it. But when you are doing it consistently, and you keep momentum up, you really do see a difference. So I would recommend people try to do intensive bursts to get themselves started with a language. Do two hours in one session rather than four half-hour sessions, and you’ll get so much better bang for your buck. Yes. And it is hard to feel that benefit at the initial stages. When we think of speaking a language, we use our native language as a basis of comparison. So we think of success as when we’re able to have a certain level of complexity—like, you can talk about your deepest philosophical beliefs. You can reach that stage, and I have reached that stage in several of my languages, but you get there only by embracing the beginner stages. So: you have to feel a lot of pride in the fact that maybe you did just have a five-minute conversation about what you do on Monday mornings, you know? The other stuff will come. This is why I say I have a goal of making mistakes. I aim to make 200 mistakes a day—that’s kind of part of my philosophy. Then it’s a lot easier to get into your flow, because you’re ticking that box of making mistakes rather than ticking the box of, ‘I’m going to have a debate on the meaning of existence in Spanish.’ That’s not something you really want to be worried about in your first months."

"Yes, this is written by a friend of mine, Olly Richards. What I like about this book is that Olly tried to come up with genuine, real world dialogue. Because one issue I have with a lot of course books is that it can feel extremely artificial. I used one audio course that tried to teach me a language using all this business terminology. It was all about ‘my wife and my secretary,’ and at the time I didn’t have a wife, I didn’t have a secretary. It just felt so irrelevant to me that the conversation felt bland. What Olly did in these books is he really tried to make the conversations realistic in terms of what people are more likely to use as beginners. And then, of course, use those stories as a way of teaching the language. So you have both the context of the realistic, actual Spanish you’re likely to come across, while also getting a bit of hand holding in terms of learning how the language works."

"So a book like this is definitely not the kind of book you want to read start to finish. It is essentially just a list of words. But the power of this book is if you have certain conversations you know that you’re likely to have, then you can flick ahead to that category. This has been great for me. I used an earlier print of this very book when I first moved to Spain , a few months into my project when, for instance, I needed to find a new flat. Then, I went to the accommodation section, and saw a very simple list of all the words related to what I would need to know in terms of floor space, and how high the rent would be. So: just words like ‘rent,’ and ‘apartment,’ and ‘door,’ and so on. It’s better than a dictionary, because they’re all collected by category, and won’t overwhelm people with the amount of words that they don’t know. Based on your background, there are certain words you’re going to need more than others. As an engineer, my first job in Spain was related to engineering. So I needed to know technical words a lot quicker than I needed to know, for instance, the names of countries. On a generic list of vocabulary, you tend to hear what the translation of country names are a lot faster than you would technical words for parts of a computer. That makes sense for the vast majority of people, but your particular case is going to be different to somebody else’s. Each individual needs to learn the vocabulary that’s relevant to them. I needed to learn how to talk about my travels, I needed to learn how to talk about Ireland in particular, I needed to talk about technical things related to my job. Again, as a beginner, you don’t want to be worrying too much about grammar. It’s fine if you’re choppily saying stuff like: ‘Supermarket, where?’ instead of piecing together a perfect sentence. You can do so much more with more words, and that’s why a book like this can be so helpful."

"Yes. Like Olly gives you the conversational language you’re likely to use in many scenarios, this is specifically a collection of pre-made questions that you’re likely to ask, and pre-made answers you’ll hear in response. So it’s not necessarily conversations, but those initial bursts when you want to form a full sentence. Let’s say, there are certain things that you know you’re going to ask, so rather than say, ‘Bathroom, where?’ you can learn the phrase, ‘Where is the bathroom?’ because that’s something that you ask regularly enough. Instead of learning the grammatical process behind that, you can just take the entire phrase like it’s one chunk of information, and learn that phrase. This phrasebook is essentially a list of all of these phrases that travellers tended to need a lot, and there is a lot of overlap between travel-related phrases and phrases you’re likely to use in other situations—say, if you are learning Spanish to speak to a Spanish-speaking family member. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . People can learn these phrases without needing to understand the complexity of the grammar behind them. Because even if you don’t yet understand the difference between ‘is,’ ‘be,’ and ‘are,’ or whether it’s in the first, second or third person, you can still learn the phrase, ‘Where is the supermarket?’ and say it off the cuff, and be confident it’s a grammatically correct sentence. Whenever I travel to a country, the first thing I do is pick up one of these phrasebooks, because that way I can just learn full phrases for the absolute essentials. I can say things, I can communicate, I can see what their likely replies are going to be in those scenarios. One of the reasons I didn’t recommend books that are grammar-heavy is not necessarily because I am anti-grammar. It’s more the case that I’m presuming that the people who are seeking this kind of advice are beginners, and I highly, highly recommend beginners do not put a lot of time into grammar. With that being said, when you have that momentum in the language and you reach a certain level, an intermediate level where people can talk to you if they’re patient and you can actually have quite a lot of conversations— that ‘s the point where grammar becomes very useful. And it’s not just useful, then, but interesting. Because here’s the thing: if I gave you a random grammatical explanation about Spanish and you have just started to learn it, it’s got nothing for you to attach it to. It’ll go in one ear, out the other, it’s not interesting. “I highly, highly recommend beginners do not put a lot of time into grammar” Whereas if you’ve already learned Spanish for quite a while and can say lot, you just don’t really understand the logic, when I explain a rule, it’s like a light bulb goes off in your head. You’re like, ‘ That ‘s why they say it that way.’ That extra bit of context makes it interesting, and that makes it more fun to learn, because you’re filling in the gaps when you already have a lot of language to fill with. Getting grammar first is like getting the blueprints of a house when you don’t have any materials to build with, you know? I do like grammar-heavy books, but only as an intermediate learner. At that stage, I have enough enough vocabulary, I have enough practice, I’m able to communicate—I’m just not able to communicate in a sophisticated-sounding way. It’s time to tidy things up. You don’t tidy an empty house, you know? Well, it really depends on what the goals you have for that language. When people imagine high levels of proficiency, I think they imagine working professionally in the language, which is absolutely great. So, for instance, I have a C2 diploma in Spanish. This is given by the Instituto Cervantes, and is the highest level of mastery that you can get in a language from this institution. So I can work as a professional engineer in Spanish, and that’s great. I had to work very hard and put a lot of effort into that. But, realistically, at the level I was before that—let’s say the B2 level on the European scale —I was socially equivalent. I could go hang out in the pub with my mates, and talk about everything in Spanish like I would in English. That’s not the mastery level, but that’s actually more than enough for what a lot of people need. Most people don’t need to work as a professional in their new language; they just want to have a social equivalency in the language. That’s why I would tend to have that as an ultimate goal for most people, because maybe, yes, you want to be bilingual, have perfect equivalency, and do everything that you can do in English, but we don’t really need to do everything in a second language that we need to do in English. “Most people don’t need to work as a professional in their new language; they just want to have a social equivalency” Sometimes we just need to have an active social life, and that is an absolutely worthy end goal that you can reach realistically in the space of a year—less, if you’re doing it intensively. And this is where I like to go with these languages. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter When it comes to attaining a level of mastery, at that stage getting exposure in conversation doesn’t really help you. There’s only a certain point you’ll get to with conversation, it’s not going to help you to refine your edges. In that case, my advice isn’t special. I would just say: ‘You’ve got to study.’ because there’s nothing magical and there’s no shortcuts at this stage. It’s just putting in the hard work of refining those edges. But you can get to the conversational stage in a lot of fun and interesting ways, and that’s why I like to advise people to have a dynamic learning approach. So: conversational practice as early as possible, and that’ll get you to the conversational stage. If you want to be able to read in Spanish too, you’ve got to change up your methodology and your entire approach. Have more reading incorporated, and maybe do some more academic things. Conversation is great, but that’s not the be all, end all of language learning."