According to the peaceful martial art of conversation for the purpose of learning a new language, the smallest unit of measurement of your progress is the Question. In other words, we don't measure your progress in the language by how many words you know, or how accurately you can conjugate verbs, but by how many questions you can answer and how well you can answer them.
With this understanding established, we can begin the work of learning to answer questions. Remember: it's about reflex, not recall.
Recently we came upon a theory that if a person were to learn to answer one question a day, five days a week, for one month (20 questions total), that person would be ahead of others using traditional methods in terms of OPI readiness. Learning just one question a day would make that person more ready for conversation than if they weren't using that method.
Part of the crux of this theory, however, is that the person must commit to truly mastering their Question of the Day. We believe it's better to learn one thing a day for 5 days rather than 5 things on one day.
We imagine it's like saying ... listen, I'm not going to go out and plant a whole garden, that would be crazy! I'm just going to go outside once a day a plant one seed. In a matter of months, I will have a blooming garden.
For 20 questions is not only 20 questions. The bits and pieces we used to construct our answers to each question begin to rearrange themselves in our minds (sometimes while we sleep) and we surprise ourselves when we can say way more than we thought we knew.
The trick is in holding fast to the course. It's one question a day, 5 days a week, no exceptions.
I don't know if I even learn one new thing every single day. Do you? And if I do, I certainly couldn't tell you what the one thing I learned on, say, July 17th 2015 was. There's no record of it! With the One-a-Day method, I will be able to ask you: what did you learn last Wednesday? And you will open your One-a-Day journal day the Question of the Day was such-and-such, and my answer was this.
It's like that trick question would you rather have $1 million right right now or a penny today, two pennies tomorrow, four pennies the next day, eight pennies the day after that and so on for a month. At first glance, $1 million sons like a lot more than a few pennies, but when you do the math you find out that the doubling quantities reach a sum of over $10 million. It's the power of exponential accumulation.
In upcoming publications, I'd like to talk about the theory of which questions you should learn and when, as we are looking for conversation that will teach us the structure and vocabulary of the language, and we would like our biggest possible return on investment in terms of the questions we learn. For now, any one question per day is good. Just sure you record your work in a journal.
You can think of it this way: just because you can answer 50 questions in your target language doesn't mean that you are necessarily fluent in that language. However if you can't answer those 50 questions, then you definitely can't be fluent in the language. So start here.
I find there is a pesky language learning negative thought that can say: well, I'll just wait until I've learned the language to master a set of questions. Of course, you'll never learn the language unless you master that set of questions! It's like saying I'll wait for the house to be built before I start laying bricks, or I will wait for the fire to be blazing before I add firewood.
My challenge to you now is this: choose your target language if you haven't already, get a notebook, and choose your question of the day. You can use ChatGPT to help you, you don't need a teacher. Also use ChatGPT help construct your answer. And then commit that question and answer to memory (by reflex, not recall). And repeat the following day.