I love / learning foreign languages. // In fact, / I love it so much / that I like to learn a new language every two years, / currently working on my eighth one. // When people find that out about me, / they always ask me, / "How do you do that? / What's your secret?" / And to be honest, / for many years, / my answer would be, / "I don't know. // I simply love learning languages." // But people were never happy with that answer. // They wanted to know / why they were spending years trying to learn even one language,/ never achieving fluency, / and here I come, / learning one language after another. They wanted to know the secret of polyglots, / people who speak a lot of languages. // And that made me wonder, / too. // How do actually other polyglots do it? // What do we have in common? // And what is it / that enables us to learn languages so much faster than other people? // I decided to meet other people like me / and find that out. // The best place to meet a lot of polyglots / is an event where hundreds of language lovers meet in one place / to practice their languages. // There are several such polyglot events organized all around the world, / and so I decided to go there / and ask polyglots about the methods that they use. // And so I met Benny from Ireland, / who told me that his method / is to start speaking from day one. // He learns a few phrases from a travel phrasebook / and goes to meet native speakers and starts having conversations with them / right away. // He doesn't mind making even 200 mistakes a day, / because that's how he learns, / based on the feedback. // And the best thing is, / he doesn't even need to travel a lot today, / because you can easily have conversations with native speakers from the comfort of your living room, / using websites. // I also met Lucas / from Brazil / who had a really interesting method to learn Russian. // He simply added / a hundred / random Russian speakers / on Skype as friends, / and then, / seriously. // And then, / he opened a chat window with one of them / and wrote "Hi" / in Russian. // And the person replied, / "Hi, how are you?" // Lucas copied this / and put it into a text window with another person, / and the person replied, / "I'm fine, thank you, and how are you?" // Lucas copied this back to the first person, / and in this way, / he had two strangers have a conversation with each other without knowing about it. // And soon he would start typing himself, / because he had so many of these conversations / that he figured out how the Russian conversation usually starts. // What an ingenious method, / right? // And then I met polyglots / who always start by imitating sounds of the language, / and others who always learn the 500 / most frequent words of the language, / and yet others / who always start by reading about the grammar. // If I asked a hundred different polyglots, / I heard a hundred different approaches to learning languages. //