Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
OVERVIEW: 
- The &quot;One(ish) Metric That Matters&quot; 
- Daily routines
- How long it takes<p>- OMTM:<p>The ONE statistic that correlates the most with moving the needle from complete beginner to high level proficiency with the language is &#x27;Hours of Conversation w&#x2F; a native speaker&#x27;.  Everything you do, and every tool you use should help increase that particular stat.<p>You learn vocab at the beginning to help yourself extend a conversation from a 1 second &#x27;Hello&#x27; to a 10 second &#x27;Hello, what do you do for fun?&#x27; + response.  You work on listening so that when the person responds you can extend the conversation a few seconds further because you understood what they said.<p>The One(ISH) part of this metric is that you will notice that as your overall &#x27;Total Hours of Conversation&#x27; increases, the average &#x27;length&#x27; of each of your conversation does as well.  The only way you&#x27;ll be able to realistically increase your hours of conversation is to move from 10 seconds exchanges to longer conversations.<p>At the beginning, all efforts can be judged by their merit on how much they add to your time talking.  Because of this, I strongly suggest picking ONE topic and ONE specific type of  person to speak with, because learning to speak at length and in depth about soccer or programming or food with a friend adds to your &#x27;Hours of Conversation&#x27; metric much faster than dabbling in all three.<p>This is why the Mormon church is able to consistently churn out fluent speakers of second languages in only a few months, because they have one kind of conversation (religious) with one type of person (prospective convert) over and over and over.  Their &#x27;hours of conversation&#x27; metric is through the roof.<p>As a side note, this is what people actually mean when they say &#x27;immersion&#x27;.  They mean &#x27;hours of conversation&#x27;.  It&#x27;s why you can learn a second language fluently equally as well from living in the country as staying in your home country.  Living in a different country just makes it easier to find people to talk with.<p>- Daily Routines: 
Every day, attempt to speak to a native speaker or speakers for a combined total of 1 hour. 
Every day, write, memorize, and include in conversation...<p>* 5 new vocab words
* 3 new phrases
* 1 new story<p>It helps to keep these related to each other.  Here would be a good set of those if you were a beginning English speaker<p>5 Words: house, clean, messy, friends, party
3 Phrases: I need to clean the house.  I am going to the party.  I want to invite my friends.
1 Story:  Last year, my friends said they wanted to have a party.  I said that we could have the party at my house.  So I cleaned the house for the whole day to get ready.  Lots of people came, and we had fun.  At the end of the party, my house was really messy.<p>Stories aren&#x27;t typically very long, but as you get better, you can add more detail.<p>- How long does it take:<p>Every day you need to do the 5-3-1 practice, and aim to have 1 hour of talk time with a native speaker.<p>At first, your talk time will be excruciating:  How do you fill an hour of conversation with only a handful of vocab words?  The short answer is &quot;you can&#x27;t&quot;, but early on you can do something like learn the phrase &#x27;what do you like to do?&#x27;, combined with the day&#x27;s vocab can take you to &#x27;what does your brother like to do?&#x27;, &#x27;what does your mom like to do&#x27;, &#x27;what does your best friend like to do&#x27;.  You can repeat those questions to several different people to try to get your &#x27;Conversation Hours&#x27; as high as reasonable.  Don&#x27;t be bummed out if at the beginning you are struggling to put in only more than a few minutes.  You&#x27;ll get it.  Try to make the next days conversations a little bit longer.<p>But, if you make it to the 90 day mark, and you have been diligent about your study efforts, it means that you have AT LEAST 90 stories, 270 phrases and at least 450 vocab words, and you will have dozens of hours of practice speaking.<p>Once you&#x27;ve arrived at that point, you will experience something magical:  On day 91, go speak with a new native speaker you haven&#x27;t spoken with yet, and they will (almost without fail) ask you &#x27;how long have you been learning &lt;language&gt;?&#x27; and when you respond &#x27;3 months&#x27;, you will get your very first &#x27;HOLY <i></i><i></i>, that&#x27;s incredible!  You sound like you&#x27;ve been speaking for at least a year!  Maybe 2!&#x27; and you will fill with pride and think to yourself &#x27;Yeah!  I am doing really wel... HOLY <i></i><i></i> I understood when that guy complimented me and I didn&#x27;t even realize it wasn&#x27;t in English!&#x27;<p>That burst of pride and excitement will be enough to carry you from working proficiency to fluent.  The hardest part is convincing yourself that you are a &#x27;language learner&#x27;, and once you experience the above and realize that you are, the rest of the journey is easy.<p>Best of luck!<p>Source:  My brothers and I are all former Mormon missionaries who learned second languages and were put in charge of helping along other new missionaries learn the language.  My brothers learned while they were in Uruguay and Spain, I learned in suburbia, USA.