When I learned English, my first foreign language, progress came slowly at first. I started studying it in school when I was six or seven years old, but I only began to improve significantly later, at university.

What really made the difference was being forced into a specific kind of practice: weekly oral exams, with little preparation, under mildly stressful conditions.

That experience taught me something important about language learning. When you study alone, it is very easy to fall into the trap of doing only what feels pleasant and comfortable.

But real progress often comes from the opposite: putting yourself, at least from time to time, into small stressful situations that force you to perform. This pushes your brain to learn under conditions that are much closer to real life.

So when I decided to learn my next languages on my own, namely Russian and Italian, I chose to recreate that same kind of productive pressure. One exercise I use is very simple :

• take one piece of content: a text, a video, or a podcast. Consume it carefully.

• record yourself for two minutes, either in audio or video, summarizing what you understood. After that, listen back to yourself honestly and try to spot the mistakes you made.

• then record a second version, without doing any extra preparation, but aiming to speak more clearly and more accurately than the first time. You can repeat the process a third time.

What I like about this exercise is that it creates a form of practice that imitates real-life speaking a little more closely. You have to react with limited preparation, organize your thoughts quickly, and express yourself under slight pressure.

And that, in my experience, is exactly the kind of condition that helps the brain assimilate a language in a much more natural way.