UNTRUTH #1:
“I’m too old and I don’t have a good memory”
[BELIEVING AGE + GENETICS IS AGAINST YOU]
If you feel like you’ve been dropping words and forgetting what you’ve learned, it may simply be because you’re not engaging your brain the right way to remember them.

Because let’s flip the script about being “too old.” What if I told you that being older was, in fact, the perfect time to learn a language – it’s at this time that we’re more responsible, more determined, and often have more time to commit.

What’s best is that language learning has a swarm of health benefits – one of keeping your brain healthy for years to come. And so if you’ve ever found yourself thinking “I’m too old”… then I encourage you to see that that’s exactly why you should keep learning a new language. Challenging your brain in this way means keeping it sharp, active, and strong.
UNTRUTH #2:
“There’s just too much to learn. There’s no way I can study
5,000 words in Spanish or 2,000 Chinese characters”
[BELIEVING YOU NEED TO LEARN ALL THE WORDS]
Let’s stop right there. First off, you ONLY need to learn the words that you’ll use. Unless you’re looking to become an undercover spy, there’s no need to memorise the Oxford dictionary

Second, what if I told you that out of all the words in the English language (which is well over a million) that the most frequent 1,000 words actually cover 85.5% of all the words typically spoken. Ultimately, it means that of over a million words floating around, you only need 1,000 of them to hold fluent conversations.

This stat bears similar results and proportions for all other languages, too. It proves that you don’t need to learn volumes of words, you just need to focus on the ones that are important – and it will do wonders to your progress.
UNTRUTH #3:
“I just need to keep hammering these lines, and it’ll make me fluent.”
[BELIEVING STRAIGHT MEMORISATION IS THE ANSWER]
After years of teaching language learning, here’s what I know to be true:

Trying to memorise everything verbatim doesn’t master languages. This method doesn’t allow you to be adaptable! Here’s an example: Let’s say someone was studying the question in their target language, “where did you go to university?” After memorising it, someone asks them, “what post-secondary school did you attend?” … and they completely freeze up, not realising it was the same question.

It’s this exact reason that I believe you have to learn words in context, not just in strict isolation. It’s why every single thing I teach and preach is the antidote to gamification apps. And it’s why it’s important to always learn the “why” behind memory techniques, so you’re not just “copy and pasting” what you learn, but rather right-clicking and exploring…